Time for another look at the latest DAZ. My last look was back in late July 2022. At that point 4.20.1.17 (April 2022) had iRay at “2021.1.2”. If you went on into the public betas then you got to 4.20.1.58, with iRay at “2021.1.6” and a thorough overhaul of FBX export.
So, at that point the major iRay “2022.0.0” beta had not yet landed in DAZ.
Softpedia now as 4.21.1.13 Beta (5th November) as the mass-market public download. Tracking back through the abbreviated changes on Softpedia doesn’t reveal much. Ah, but if you look at the the official DAZ Change Log you find…
Public Beta (4.21.1.13):
Updated to NVIDIA Iray 2022.0.1 (359000.3383)
Nice.
Although further scrutiny also reveals that because of the new NVIDIA driver requirement, iRay GPU rendering is no longer supported for Windows 7. From DS 4.21.0.5 to DS 4.21.1.13 the NVIDIA driver requirements leapt… from 471.41 to 516.93. But the last supported drivers for Windows 7 were 473.81 (for the retail gaming cards, though at a guess there may still be drivers for workstation cards?).
If you need GPU (rather than CPU rendering) on Windows 7, it now seems that 4.21.05 is as far as graphics cards users can go. This is the current offline installer found in your content library…
It gets you to iRay 2021.1.6 rather than 2022. But remember that iRay can run quite happily on CPUs, whatever the NVIDIA marketing hype would have you believe. So if you have enough CPUs and your DAZ settings look like this, you may be ok to try the latest 4.21.1.13 beta…
Ok, with that out the way, let’s look at what you get if you can get to the latest 4.21.1.26 public beta (currently ‘Installer Manager only’). You get the latest…
Updated to NVIDIA Iray 2022.1.1 (363600.1657)
Ok, so… what do iRay 2022.x and 2022.1.1 bring? Hot from the iRay dev blog, in my digested and amalgamated form…
– Deterministic guided sampling, and “fixed a performance issue when guided sampling was used on fast GPUs and/or small image resolutions.”
– Guided sampling caching on camera movement, which means “When navigating [the scene] with guidance enabled (i.e. 1spp), one now gets a much higher quality, especially in complex lighting situations”.
– Guided sampling for the caustic sampler, and “not only does the guided sampling for caustics decrease noise, but in general we fixed some issues/bugs with some of the difficult caustic paths.”
– “Much faster material and environment updates”, “overall more precise rendering and improved interactivity speed”, “reduced VDB memory usage by a lot”.
– Improved hair BSDF sampling, improved hair/fiber rendering performance on RTX capable cards.
– MotionBlur support for fiber/curve vertex motion.
– “Fixed some performance regressions (especially one that affected the DAZ benchmark scene)”.
– Ghostlight support (customisable).
– New selection/outlines [this seems to mean the annoying orange flashing that happens when you mouseover a scene object, but most people will have this turned off].
– Improved emissive volumes, “LPE support for emissive volumes”.
– New native particle / spheres system [snow, etc].
– Spectral sky model, “Qfully dynamic evaluation of environments (e.g. Sun&Sky, IBL)”.
– Multi matte output buffer. [Appears to be a form of Clown Pass, that renders the scene in pure red, blue, green, thus making selections easier in postwork?]
– Full OpenImageIO support.
– Unspecified “AI upscaling”.
Some of these will be graphics card specific, I would imagine, and the hair certainly is.