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• RMAN-20888 Adaptive sampling has been implemented in XPU.  The workflow and controls are the same as in RIS: PixelVariance, "darkfalloff", "exposurebracket", "adaptall", and per-channel "relativepixelvariance". There are two "adaptivemetric"s: "contrast" and "variance", with the latter being the default.
• RMAN-20929 An issue where using Render region in Solaris in XPU mode could lead to a crash has been addressed.
• RMAN-21526 XPU will fall back to CPU only mode if the variant is "xpu" and no capable GPU hardware is detected

Image Output and Displays

• RMAN-19362 Fixed crashes in XPU that could occur on scenes with high numbers of complicated LPE expressions.

Geometry

• RMAN-20687 XPU now supports Attribute "dice" "strategy".
• RMAN-20748 XPU now supports Attribute "dice" "string referenceinstance".
• RMAN-20747 XPU now supports the sphericalprojection dicing strategy.
• RMAN-21423 XPU no longer forces a lower bound of 0.1 on the micropolygon length.
• RMAN-20928 An issue with support for the near clipping plane in XPU has been fixed.
• RMAN-20033 XPU now supports RiClippingPlanes.
• Fixed a crash when rendering motion blurred curves in XPU using RfSolaris or Hydra.
• RMAN-21837 Several issues surrounding bias calculations for round curves in XPU which could lead to false self-intersections have been addressed.

Volumes

• RMAN-20516 XPU edits on aggregate volumes materials now correctly update the render in all cases.

Lighting

• RMAN-20906 Fix bug where rect light textures were read incorrectly.
• RMAN-21184 Fix an issue in XPU where light texture maps required absolute paths.
• RMAN-21635 Fix XPU lighting bug where light map saturation/gamma controls did not get updated in an interactive render session.
• Shadow falloff has now been implemented.
• RMAN-21744 Fix bug where XPU & RIS images did not match involving IES profiles.

Integrators

• RMAN-18198 XPU can now switch integrators during an interactive render. The Riley entry points CreateIntegrator, ModifyIntegrator and DeleteIntegrator are now supported.
• RMAN-21401 In XPU, the numLightSamples parameter to PxrPathTracer is now supported.
• Negative Bxdf emission colors are now allowed in XPU (they are no longer clamped to zero).

Shading

• XPU's default verbosity for OSL is now NORMAL instead of VERBOSE. XPU now supports Option "osl" "int verbose" to change this verbosity.
• RMAN-21227 Fixed issues which could cause crashing when interactively editing OSL pattern nodes in a DCC.
• RMAN-21935 An inconsistency between the getattribute() OSL function between XPU and RIS when dealing with array lengths has been fixed.
• RMAN-21283 XPU now has partial support for the utilityPattern parameter in PxrSurface and other shaders. Currently, only a single utilityPattern is currently supported.
• RMAN-21399 The view vector Vn is no longer incorrectly normalized in XPU.
• Implemented "followTopology" and "continuationRayMode" for XPU PxrSurface Burley diffusion ("subsurfaceType" 4).
• Implemented OSL getattribute("context", "reyesGrid", ...) lookup in XPU.
• DeleteDisplacement and DeleteMaterial (from the Riley API) are now implemented in XPU.
• RMAN-21701 The PxrSurface "diffuseExponent" parameter is now implemented in XPU.

Texturing

• RMAN-20904 Fix XPU texture filtering for displacement to better match RIS.
• RMAN-18833 The XPU memory requirements of PTex has been greatly reduced, by a factor of almost 4X on complex shots.
• XPU now automatically adjusts the texture and ptexture reserved cache allocation size to be the minimum of the requested texture memory limit option, and the actual size needed to store all the highest mipmap level texture tiles in the scene. In cases where there are very few textures in the scene and the requested texture memory limit has been set very high, this can be a substantial memory reduction.
• RMAN-19353 Some issues in XPU's substitution of <u> and <v> tokens in texture file map names have been addressed.
• RMAN-21751 A bug in XPU causing the texture filter widths on non-quad subdivision faces to be off by a factor of two has been fixed.

Statistics

• Fixed live updates for XPU time-to-first metrics.

RIS and XPU

Deep Output

• RMAN-21298 dsview, dtexmerge (now renamed deepmerge), sho, and other auxiliary programs now support DeepEXR files natively. dsview has also received several improvements.

Image Output and Displays

• Multiple crash issues surrounding switching between RIS and XPU in Solaris have been addressed.

• RMAN-21782 Eliminated "IMAGE_REL_AMD64_ADDR32NB relocation requires an ordered section layout." errors that could lead to crashes.

Ray tracing

• XPU now has full support for trace groups and membership. This includes:
  • support for Attribute "trace" "reflectsubset", "reflectexcludesubset", "transmitsubset", "transmitexcludesubset", "shadowsubset", and "shadowexcludesubset"
  • support for the "shadowSubset" and "shadowExcludeSubset" parameters to light sources, which implement light-shadow linking

Image Output and Displays

• RMAN-19362 Fixed crashes in XPU that could occur on scenes with high numbers of complicated LPE expressions.
• RMAN-21472 XPU now supports the "sum" pixel filter type.

Geometry

• RMAN-20687 XPU now supports Attribute "dice" "strategy".
• RMAN-20748 XPU now supports Attribute "dice" "string referenceinstance".
• RMAN-20747 XPU now supports the sphericalprojection dicing strategy.
• RMAN-21423 XPU no longer forces a lower bound of 0.1 on the micropolygon length.
• RMAN-20928 An issue with support for the near clipping plane in XPU has been fixed.
• RMAN-20033 XPU now supports RiClippingPlanes.
• Fixed a crash when rendering motion blurred curves in XPU using RfSolaris or Hydra.
• RMAN-21837 Several issues surrounding bias calculations for round curves in XPU which could lead to false self-intersections have been addressed.

Volumes

• RMAN-20516 XPU edits on aggregate volumes materials now correctly update the render in all cases.

Lighting

• RMAN-18217 Portal lights are now supported in XPU.
• RMAN-18747 Light filters are now supported in XPU.
• RMAN-20906 Fix bug where rect light textures were read incorrectly.
• RMAN-21184 Fix an issue in XPU where light texture maps required absolute paths.
• RMAN-21635 Fix XPU lighting bug where light map saturation/gamma controls did not get updated in an interactive render session.
• Shadow falloff has now been implemented.
• RMAN-21744 Fix bug where XPU & RIS images did not match involving IES profiles.

Integrators

• RMAN-18198 XPU can now switch integrators during an interactive render. The Riley entry points CreateIntegrator, ModifyIntegrator and DeleteIntegrator are now supported.
• RMAN-21401 In XPU, the numLightSamples parameter to PxrPathTracer is now supported.
• Negative Bxdf emission colors are now allowed in XPU (they are no longer clamped to zero).

Shading

• XPU's default verbosity for OSL is now NORMAL instead of VERBOSE. XPU now supports Option "osl" "int verbose" to change this verbosity.
• RMAN-21227 Fixed issues which could cause crashing when interactively editing OSL pattern nodes in a DCC.
• RMAN-21935 An inconsistency between the getattribute() OSL function between XPU and RIS when dealing with array lengths has been fixed.
• RMAN-21283 XPU now has partial support for the utilityPattern parameter in PxrSurface and other shaders. Currently, only a single utilityPattern is currently supported.
• RMAN-21399 The view vector Vn is no longer incorrectly normalized in XPU.
• RMAN-21774 Implemented "followTopology" and "continuationRayMode" for XPU PxrSurface Burley diffusion ("subsurfaceType" 4).
• Implemented OSL getattribute("context", "reyesGrid", ...) lookup in XPU.
• DeleteDisplacement and DeleteMaterial (from the Riley API) are now implemented in XPU.
• RMAN-21701 The PxrSurface "diffuseExponent" parameter is now implemented in XPU.

Texturing

• RMAN-20904 Fix XPU texture filtering for displacement to better match RIS.
• RMAN-18833 The XPU memory requirements of PTex has been greatly reduced, by a factor of almost 4X on complex shots.
• XPU now automatically adjusts the texture and ptexture reserved cache allocation size to be the minimum of the requested texture memory limit option, and the actual size needed to store all the highest mipmap level texture tiles in the scene. In cases where there are very few textures in the scene and the requested texture memory limit has been set very high, this can be a substantial memory reduction.
• RMAN-19353 Some issues in XPU's substitution of <u> and <v> tokens in texture file map names have been addressed.
• RMAN-21751 A bug in XPU causing the texture filter widths on non-quad subdivision faces to be off by a factor of two has been fixed.

Statistics

• Fixed live updates for XPU time-to-first metrics.

• RELEASE NOTE: Corrected XPU reporting of maxSamples, timeToFirst* and other high-level metrics.

RIS and XPU

Deep Output

• RMAN-21298 dsview, dtexmerge (now renamed deepmerge), sho, and other auxiliary programs now support DeepEXR files natively. dsview has also received several improvements.

Image Output and Displays

• RMAN-20972 RMAN-20972 Added new LPE flags: 'worldtransform;' / 'objecttransform;' / 'cameratransform;' which will transform the output to the desired space. The transform will operate as if the output is a position unless a 'normal;' or 'vector;' flag is also given. The 'normal;' flag will also normalize the output which helps with certain cases in Lama where layering normals can give unhelpful results.
• decidither level controls for XPU Progressive Pixels mode are now supported.

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• RMAN-19096 Improved time to first pixel for scenes with many instances by around 5x to 7x or more in both RIS and XPU. In addition, interactive editing and deleting operations on these instances have also been sped up substantially.
• RMAN-20963 A precision issue that could lead to self intersection on flat polygons with user normals in the opposite direction of the renderer computed normals has been fixed (both RIS and XPU).
• RMAN-21578 Users can now use namespaced primvars. Primvars which start with the namespaces used by standard Renderman primvars will still be culled (for example the ri/grouping/dice/trace namespaces).

...

• OSL gettextureinfo() can now query metadata in textures.  This is limited to only OpenEXR format textures, and will fail if it can't be done at shader JIT-compile time and constant-folded, which means it's largly incompatible with file-name substitution tokens.
• PxrSurface subsurface "continuationRayMode" 2 (and 1) for "subsurfaceType" 0, 2, 3, and 4 now receives subsurface scattering from the last hit which was previously missing under some circumstances.  And the subsurface scattering noise may be reduced.

• The LPE for direct subsurface scattering in RIS has changed from two bounces C<TD3><TD2>L to a single bounce C<TD3>L. However, the commonly used LPE for subsurface scattering -- CD3[DS]*L -- (which includes optional secondary bounces) works as before.

• Reduce fireflies in diffusion subsurface scattering near 90 degree angles -- as on cubes etc.

Statistics

• Support for gRPC for live stats has been eliminated.
• Improved Telemetry Listener output formatting.
• Missing events in the Telemetry Listener are now included.
• The CSV output from the Telemetry Listener is now sorted by time by default. This can be disabled in the configuration with the "sortOutput" option.
• RMAN-21104 : Change listener name separator to '+' to avoid confusion with Windows drive letters. Now if a DCC needs to override the output filename of an existing JsonReport listener it prefixes the filename with "listener_name+"

Texturing

• default. This can be disabled in the configuration with the "sortOutput" option.
• RMAN-21104 : Change listener name separator to '+' to avoid confusion with Windows drive letters. Now if a DCC needs to override the output filename of an existing JsonReport listener it prefixes the filename with "listener_name+"

• JSON report viewing capabilities in stportal have been expanded.

• stportal now includes filter button and additional search actions including wildcard and regex.

• Reduced excessive DEBUG-level logging from the live stats system.

• Fixed a timing bug which caused the renderer to produce inaccurately high timing stats on the Linux platform when running on some recent CPUs.

Texturing

• The OSL shaders PxrTexture, PxrMultiTexture, PxrLayeredTexture, PxrBump, and PxrNormalMap have a new int parameter: "smoothRayDerivs". When 1 (which is the default value), derivatives and hence texture filter widths at ray hit points are computed in a more robust manner, providing consistent widths independent of the orientation of the underlying surface geometry. When 0, the old formula (using straight Dx() and Dy() OSL derivatives) is used for the texture filter widthsThe texture filter sizes used in OSL shaders such as PxrTexture -- both for ray hit point shading and displacement shading -- are now more consistent for geometry with non-perpendicular u-v axis.

RIS

Geometry

• A bug in the shadow and reflection trace bias for round cubic curves in RIS has been fixed.  The bias is now consistent with flat and linear curves, and also consistent with XPU.  The fix causes changes in shadows and shading on round cubic curves, particularly near other objects.  To get the old behavior: Option "trace" "int incorrectCurveBias" [0|1]. The default is 0.

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• RMAN-21296 Fixed an issue where changing the pixel variance in Solaris had no effect in RIS renders.
• RMAN-20743 Added "raytracebakedisplacement" option for baking. This option helps prevent artifacts when baking using trace() calling patterns, such as PxrDirt and PxrOcclusion.
• RMAN-21546 OpenEXR and DeepEXR autocrop can now use any AOV which has alpha as its source. which has alpha as its source. DeepEXR will also no longer crash if autocrap is enabled without an alpha channel.
• Add two new parameters to the OpenEXR driver: "string asrgbacolorchannel" and "string asrgbaalphachannel". If supplied, these strings automatically force "asrgba" to be 1, and then serve as the actual channels that get converted to "RGB" and "A" instead of "Ci" and "a".
• RMAN-21883 The "asrgba" parameter to the OpenEXR and DeepEXR display driver now correctly defaults to 1, matching the Args file. This only changes behavior in RfK or RIB files where asrgba is not explicitly set.

Volumes

• Attribute "volume" "temporalmethod" is no longer supported. The only method of generating temporal data for volume rendering is the Eulerian method.
• Added caching to OpenVDB, which improves performance in cases where the same VDB grid is used many times.

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• RMAN-20966 Integer primvars can now be properly accessed from OSL.
• The PxrRamp pattern now has a more intuitive 0-1 default.

Textures

• RMAN-20729 The scalability of the texture cache when using many threads on RIS has been greatly increased.

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