AMD Releases Updated ProRender 2.2 Plugin For 3ds Max – We Test 13 GPU Configurations

Last month, we tried to counter April’s showers with a look at the performance of two ray tracing renderers: AMD’s Radeon ProRender, and Chaos Group’s V-Ray. On the V-Ray side, the latest 4.0 version brings significant performance boosts, especially if you’re using a GPU equipped with Tensor cores. At the time our ProRender article went live, the 2.1.5.0 version of the plugin had been out for a while, but we still wanted to talk about current performance.

At that time, we had no idea that the next ProRender release would be right around the corner. Today, AMD is releasing new ProRender plugins for Blender, Maya, and also 3ds Max. Currently, 3ds Max 2019 isn’t supported, but it’s coming; 2016-2018 are the latest officially supported versions. With Blender getting so much ProRender love, I am considering adding that to our Linux test suite, since that tool is already heavily used in other suites (eg: CPU).

The GPUs used throughout testing, including workstation and gaming cards.

I happened to receive a preview of the new ProRender for 3ds Max (2.2) on the eve of business travel (you’ll learn more on that soon), so I had a limited amount of time to dig in. That said, by the power of some strange force in the universe, I was able to get all 13 GPU configurations from our updated look at workstation performance a couple of weeks ago retested.

And… here are those updated results:

AMD said that it made some performance improvements in the latest version of the 3ds Max plugin, and these results prove that it wasn’t kidding. Overall, there is a 10-15% improvement in performance with the latest version for mid-range and low-end cards, and more modest improvements for the higher-end cards, however, there were a few outliers.

The WX 7100 showed the biggest gains at 25%, but the higher clock speeds of the gaming RX 580 does help pull that ahead – at least for rendering (viewport is another matter). One peculiarity was that NVIDIA’s low-end P2000 and high-end Titan Xp both showed reduced performance. This anomaly was repeatable with numerous retests, so it’s hard to draw a conclusion as to the cause, since all other cards showed improvements, albeit to a lesser extent.

ProRender is also receiving a few more features too, such as support for volumetrics and interactive denoising (something that’s been getting a lot of attention in the rendering circles).

AMD is also releasing its updated quarterly high-stability drivers for professional series cards, 18.Q2. These updates center around mostly viewport optimizations for 3ds Max, CATIA, Creo and Solidworks. Most of the improvements were compared to last-years drivers, so quarter-to-quarter improvements are in fact a lot less than the 40%+ being reported in the press release, at least by our testing when we were updating our workstation compendium linked above. 18.Q2 is also an enterprise driver that’s ready for the latest Windows 10 April 2018 update that will begin to roll out in the coming months (deferred released schedule).