For artists and studios using V-Ray, rendering performance is crucial to maintaining creative flow and meeting deadlines. Time is money, as they say. As PC hardware becomes increasingly powerful, software-defined performance improvements are playing an increasingly large role in performance gains that can be enjoyed by users. As today’s example, new capabilities in Intel® oneAPI DPC++/C++ (ICX) Compiler and Hardware Profile-Guided Optimizations (HWPGO) can be utilized to enable 15% faster rendering times on Intel Core Ultra processors.
Let’s explore how ICX and HWPGO optimizations enhance the performance of V-Ray for Cinema 4D and how it translates to faster render times for artists.
Understanding the Role of Compilers in Rendering
Rendering software like V-Ray relies heavily on complex computations that stress your processor. These complex computations are designed by a software programmer with a coding language. The code written by the software programmer must be put into a “compiler,” which turns the human-readable code into instructions that the processor can understand and execute.
While compiling a usable application, a compiler users “heuristics”—speculative or iterative learning—to build code the compiler thinks will be most effective. But performance can still be improved if that type of learning is swapped for profile-guided optimization, which utilizes actual application usage data to steer how the code is compiled and streamlined.
This is somewhat like learning a new hobby with the care and attention of a trained expert with real experience, rather than your own trial and error. The first one is definitely faster, and it’s the same for computer code!
The Tools Involved
Chaos V-Ray is a photorealistic ray-traced render that includes both CPU and CPU+GPU hybrid rendering options. V-Ray uses adaptive ray-tracing technology and scene intelligence to create photorealistic imagery and animations.
Intel® oneAPI DPC++/C++ Compiler (ICX)
ICX is an LLVM-based, cross-architecture compiler designed to optimize performance for x86 processors. This compiler adds advanced optimizations for features like vectorization and parallelization to enhance performance. ICX also features hardware profile-guided optimization (which we will touch on below) and integration with popular developer tools and libraries. ICX features cross-architecture support, allowing developers to support all CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs.
Hardware Profile-Guided Optimization (HWPGO)
Part of ICX, HWPGO is Intel’s custom implementation of generic PGO that fine-tunes software performance based on performance data of actual usage scenarios. Here is a little breakdown of how HWPGO works:
- Training—The software is run with representative workloads to gather performance data, such as frequently executed code paths, call-stacks, and taken branch patterns. In essence, measuring how the app “actually uses the processor.”
- Optimization—The compiler uses this data to optimize the code, potentially inlining functions, reducing instruction cache misses by moving hot code close to each other, and prioritizing code paths by reordering branches.
Though the idea of profile-guided optimization (PGO) is not new, the traditional approach depends on instrumenting the code to measure its performance, which adds significant time and computational overhead to training the optimization. Intel’s HWPGO, on the other hand, exclusively uses performance monitoring data that can be collected in the background without much overhead. This approach reduces the collection time from tens of hours to minutes.
ICX and HWPGO for V-Ray ensure the rendering engine performs well under common scenarios such as global illumination, complex shaders, and multi-threaded workloads. As a bonus, not only do Intel-based systems see this performance uplift, but our competition also sees a boost in performance due to the power of Intel software optimizations.
Benefits of ICX and HWPGO in V-Ray for Cinema 4D
Optimizations provided by ICX with HWPGO result in faster render times across Intel processors, including previous generations. Artists using Intel Core Ultra 200H (“Arrow Lake-H”) series processors can expect up to 13% faster rendering capabilities, while users on the previous generation of Intel Core Ultra 100H (“Meteor Lake-H”) series processors can experience up to 17% faster performance.
Want to see these performance gains for yourself? Make sure you’re running the latest version of V-Ray 7 for Cinema 4D or newer, and let it rip! That’s all it takes!
We appreciate our partners like Chaos, who trusted Intel and made the leap to our newest compiler. It’s not easy to upend your award-winning renderer with a new compiler, but the performance results clearly explain why this was a great decision. The combination of ICX and HWPGO is a game-changer for V-Ray users in Cinema 4D. By ensuring the rendering engine is finely tuned to both the hardware and workloads, these optimizations deliver faster render times, better resource utilization, and a smoother experience. V-Ray for Cinema 4D is the first to get these optimizations. These same optimizations will be released for all other V-Ray SKUs throughout 2025 and 2026.
As rendering demands continue to grow, staying ahead of the curve with cutting-edge compiler and software-defined performance technologies ensures that users are always getting the most from their hardware.
Footnotes
- Performance results are based on testing as of March 2025. Chaos V-Ray with Maxon Cinema 4D: This workload measures the time in seconds to render a scene using the V-Ray rendering plugin for Cinema 4D.
- Processor: Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 285H processor; tested on an Intel Internal development system; Memory: DDR5-6400 64GB; Display Resolution: 1920x1080; OS: Microsoft Windows 11 26100.2454; Intel Arc Graphics 32.0.101.6629; NPU Driver: 32.0.100.3159; BIOS: PR3 CORP; Power Plan set to Balanced, Power Mode set to “Best Performance”
- Processor: Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 185H processor; tested on an Intel Internal development system; Memory: DDR5-5600 64GB; Display Resolution: 1920x1080; OS: Microsoft Windows 11 26100.1882; Intel Arc Graphics 32.0.101.6629; NPU Driver: 32.0.100.3103; BIOS: MR5 CORP; Power Plan set to Balanced, Power Mode set to “Best Performance”
Performance varies by use, configuration, and other factors. Learn more on the Performance Index site.
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