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Why has Zbrush not been designed to support both CPU and GPU?

Dear Software Engineers at Pixologic
I have been enjoying ZB for some time, and many thx to your effort!
It might be a layman’s question. However, I am still wondering why ZB has been designed to utilize only CPU. I have a RX480 with 8G memory, it would be wonderful if ZB could make full use of the hardware resource.
So, is it possible to have a version of ZB in the future supporting GPU acceleration?:roll_eyes:

I have been looking for a proper session to post this idea. If this is not the right place to do so, please just remove it and nvm.

I think they are aware of it.
Do you know that the new Polygroupit extension is supporting GPU?
It’s a little standalone software…

I think the main reason is it doesn’t use polygons and traditional phong/lambertian rendering like Maya for example. It has used “pixols” and rendering tricks to achieve poly counts much higher and faster than gpu rendering for years.

On the other hand, the possibility is there now to use the gpu for computing and could possibly take over the pixol rendering, also for heavy processing like decimation and dynamesh/tessimate. Keep in mind though: that work is typically more easily done in Cuda, which runs only on NVidia cards, because NVidia has made a nice API. That’s how Redshift does such great offline rendering at crazy speeds. As much as I like AMD, if you want to get the most out of gpu acceleration outside of viewports and games (including if zbrush gets it) you’ll sometimes wait a fair bit longer for AMD support.

i really wish if ZBrush can support some GPU acceleration for viewport display -from technical view it might be hard (but not impossible) to re-write the whole program to do that.
-Just fast note a bit on topic, Nextlimit re-wrote new Fluid emitters called “Dyverso” for Realflow that are fully GPU accelerated & they really benefit from high speed, they didn’t insist to stay with older CPU stuff as is. -

I hope pixologic will do similar thing so soon. imagine your navigation on the screen is much lightweight & fast even with millions of polygons AHEM sorry lol, I mean 2.5D pixols ,not real 3D with GPU acceleration
& lets your CPU has more room/freedom to process other ZBrsuh intensive operations , more efficient than loading the whole program mostly on CPU, as if we are still in the era of ZBrush 2 when we needed to install Java Runtime environment for it to work -you remember those old days everyone ?-