Please keep this here updated! I'm also interested in a version which supports optix via network.😊

Hi Todd,

I'm doing a couple of things today, one, looking at cards again, seeing how far off we are from purchasing one, we're in Australia, so we really get shafted when it comes to prices, being so isolated in terms of distance, our options are high prices, or a flight to the US and the AUD to USD exchange rate (so high prices are the only realistic option as you can imagine). I'd also need to be looking at potentially a new system, all our hardware is nearly ten years old now, so I'll be needing to read carefully to make sure the mobo's/CPUs are going to wrk ok. They don't need to be incredible quick, just functional.

Also thanks for the generous offer of a loan :), maybe that would work out if we were locals xD. Though shipping internationally might be as much as actually buying the card ourselves once we ship it here and back again, plus insurance :)

The other thing is to ask the developers who do the cycles dev work what we did wrong. Probably best I ask before I try again sending you more builds, as that would be guess work on my part.

Thanks for your patience :)

Thanks James for the background on this. If you were here in the States, I would be happy to lend you one of my RTX cards. With so many people at home these days, prices are much higher than they should be at this point in the RTX 20x0 series' lifecycle. Hopefully you'll be able to get a card, even if it's an original 2060.

If you want to send me builds to test, I'm happy to do that. Doing the testing in order to possibly get Optix support sooner is worth it for me.

Have you been in touch with the Blender Devs on insights in how to implement? Maybe they would be willing to test too?

Hi Todd,

Apologies for the late reply :(, seems our forum is still broke despite us asking our web provider (who shall remain nameless until I can't stand it no more) to fix this. We don't get any notifications of new posts, so I trawl the site as much as I can looking for posts that have no response or answer.

Ok, so, we have no Optix capable card on our hands to try this right now. Support for Optix is definitely something we are going to work on. Right now its not supported. We had a go at supporting it with another user, who reported that, despite our best efforts, the patched build we sent them did not work. It appears we're missing something.

What we did try was to add support the same way we did for cycles's other devices, namely CPU, CUDA and OPENCL since we assumed, somewhat naively, that support for OPTIX would be handled the same way. However, this build didn't work in the hands of our dear user who we were trying to help out and we didn't progress this work since we have no CUDA cards in our systems at all right now.

We're saving for an RTX capable card though, once we have it we'll be able to figure out what is going on and support it properly. Till then, well, we could try again if you're keen to test an experimental build? Though I'll be realistic, that might be hit and miss as we're not able to test if its working before letting you have a go. As you might have already guessed, development moves at the pace you can test and experiment, which is very slow if we're having to exchange e-mails between each test. Hence our desire to get a card and experiment with it here.

Hope this helps, happy to talk further if you want to help out testing :)