I had a quick look at the Softpedia changelog digest for DAZ Studio. My last look was at the January 2021 version, which had then added iRay 2020.1.3.
I had overlooked a March 2021 DAZ Studio release which saw an…
“Update to NVIDIA Iray 2020.1.5 (334300.8936)”
But the June 2021 release appears to have dropped back two versions…
“Integrated Iray 2020.1.3 (334300.6349)”
So what was briefly in 2020.1.4 / 2020.1.5 iRay? Not a lot for either. Bugfixes and new updates for some under-the-hood internal libraries. So we’re not missing much, by the look of it, by dropping back from 1.5 to 1.3. The current DAZ Studio beta is 18th August, but judging by the forums that’s cutting-edge early-adopter seat-of-the-pants stuff.
However, I see that the iRay devs currently have iRay up at 2021.0.1, and it has rather more exciting goodies. Their key focus has been to add much faster volumetrics and caustics and better light-spill.
Also…
“dramatically decreased host/CPU texture memory usage”
“Dramatically” sounds good. When this reaches DAZ it sounds like it could further speed up a real-time CPU-driven viewport. Nice.
They also have an improved Interactive version of iRay, although that sounds like it needs an expensive RTX card…
The CPU memory improvement means that when DAZ plugs in iRay 2021.0.1, that could well be a good reason for me to jump to the then-latest version. I currently run iRay on CPUs alone, and can do so in a large viewport in near real-time.