Iray Photoreal

Iray Photoreal is an interactive, ray-tracing based render mode that generates "push-button" photorealistic imagery featuring complex global illumination effects. Iray Photoreal makes use of a highly optimized BSDF and EDF based framework, essentially capturing the physical behaviour of real-world materials and light sources. Iray Photoreal can leverage NVIDIA CUDA capable GPUs to render photorealistic images much faster than on a CPU, due to the highly parallel nature of the underlying simulation processes. If a system does not feature CUDA capable graphics boards it will automatically fall back to using only CPU based rendering. This will produce the same images but typically the rendering will take longer to complete. In addition, it can also use both resources at the same time.

The following topics provide an introduction to Iray Photoreal, document its system requirements and limitations, and provide further details about capabilities and options.