I want to increase the speed of the ray tracing operation by purchasing a 2060 video card. Now we use the integrated graphics of the Intel i7 processor.
Is there a question in your post, or do you want some kind of comment?
I think it is a question, but with inaccurate translation from Russian.
You are only meant to use raytracing 3D rendering for producing marketing images. The i7 with Intel graphics should be fast enough for all but the largest and complex boards
As cleared by @kammutierspule (the main 3D viewer developer)
here:
The hardware specification should not be a problem (but OS and Drivers may be)
I developed 3D Viewer without GPU drivers and it is using OpenGL specification that is compatible with graphic boards older than 10 years.
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I was going to say that a graphics card would hardly make raytracing faster because raytracing isn’t hardware accelerated, but then I found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray-tracing_hardware, specifically mentioning Nvidia RTX 2000 series cards. However, it would need software support, and I don’t think KiCad’s renderer uses such a software API, or can someone else tell something more?
See https://code.blender.org/2019/07/accelerating-cycles-using-nvidia-rtx/, it may give something like 5…10x speedup. But more traditional CUDA (or maybe OpenCL) would also give considerable speedup - if the rendering library uses it.
The raytracing operation is threaded. You will increase your speed by using a processor with more cores.
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The KiCad raytracing only uses CPU and RAM, not GPU.
A faster GPU will have no effect on the render speed or capabilities.
It uses no libraries or API, it was all developed specific for KiCad.
There is no way to directly port it to use GPU.
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