Indigo Dev Update Q4 2020

It's been a challenging year globally, so we thought it's a good time to give a bit of positive news and an outlook on where Indigo is heading next.
First and foremost, Indigo 4.4 is nearing completion and a stable release is almost done, thus exiting beta phase.

Core technology updates for future releases:

Indigo currently supports GPU rendering through OpenCL and while Indigo is the best-in-class OpenCL renderer - in terms of speed and performance - we felt it's time to look into further optimization possibilities and new routes to evolve its core technology.

More specifically:

Cuda, Metal and Vulkan APIs.

By enabling Indigo to use these APIs, we're future-proofing Indigo's GPU rendering engine across all platforms and operating systems, while also making new technologies possible, such as out-of-core rendering, hardware accelerated ray tracing (for example Nvidia RTX) and more.

Progress update:

The work on Cuda is nearly done, with only some minor issues left.
Some key points:

- Feature parity with Indigo's OpenCL implementation.
- Mixing + matching with OpenCL devices - use your Cuda capable GPUs alongside your OpenCL capable GPUs for multi-GPU rendering.

Here's the supercar benchmark scene, rendered with Cuda.