Maximize Performance of Nvidia’s Iray Render Time

Maxwell GPUs/Windows 10 performance improvement

The Iray Development Blog recently posted this information regarding iRay render times and setting for users with particular hardware.

For Maxwell generation CUDA cards (MX000 or a GeForce 9XX) and on Windows 10,

Ensure that you have all the latest Windows 10 updates installed.

Especially critical is the “Anniversary Update”, build 1607 from August 2016.

Be sure to install a recent NVIDIA driver (378.XX).

A new option to the NVIDIA control panel is “Optimize for Compute Performance”.

Make sure to set this to on, either globally if you do not play games on that machine and also do not have other high-end GL or DX things running, or for the specific applications only that include Iray such as 3Ds Max, Maya, Catia, Rhino, and Daz3D.

Especially for complex scenes this can make a huge difference and finally brings the performance of Windows 10 on Maxwell on par with Windows 7.