• Improved multi-segment motion blur support for scenes with different number of time steps per mesh.
• New top level BVH builder that improves build times and BVH quality of two-level BVHs.
• Added support to enable only a single ISA. Previously code was always compiled for SSE2.
• Improved single ray tracing performance for incoherent rays on AVX512 architectures by 5-10%.
• Improved packet/hybrid ray tracing performance for incoherent rays on AVX512 architectures by 10-30%.
• Improved stream ray tracing performance for coherent rays in structure-of-pointers layout by 40-70%.
• BVH builder for compact scenes of triangles and quads needs essentially no temporary memory anymore. This doubles the maximal scene size that can be rendered in compact mode.
• Triangles no longer store the geometry normal in fast/default mode which reduces memory consumption by up to 20%.
• Compact mode uses BVH4 now consistently which reduces memory consumption by up to 10%.
• Reduced memory consumption for small scenes (of 10k-100k primitives) and dynamic scenes.
• Improved performance of user geometries and instances through BVH8 support.
• The API supports now specifying the geometry ID of a geometry at construction time. This way matching the geometry ID used by Embree and the application is simplified.
• Fixed a bug that would have caused a failure of the BVH builder for dynamic scenes when run on a machine with more then 1000 threads.
• Fixed a bug that could have been triggered when reaching the maximal number of mappings under Linux (vm.max_map_count). This could have happened when creating a large number of small static scenes.
• Added huge page support for Windows and MacOSX (experimental).
• Added support for Visual Studio 2017.
• Removed support for Visual Studio 2012.
• Precompiled binaries now require a CPU supporting at least the SSE4.2 ISA.
• We no longer provide precompiled binaries for 32 bit on Windows.
• Under Windows one now has to use the platform toolset option in CMake to switch to Clang or the Intel® Compiler.
• Fixed a bug for subdivision meshes when using the incoherent scene flag.
• Fixed a bug in the line geometry intersection, that caused reporting an invalid line segment intersection with primID -1.
• Buffer stride for vertex buffers of different time steps of triangle and quad meshes have to be identical now.
• Fixed a bug in the curve geometry intersection code when passed a perfect cylinder.