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V-Ray offers two rendering engines - V-Ray and V-Ray GPU.

GPU rendering allows V-Ray to perform the raytracing calculations on the GPU cards installed in the system, rather than the CPU. Since GPUs are specifically designed for massively parallel calculations, they can speed up the rendering process by an order of magnitude. V-Ray GPU uses NVidia CUDA or RTX device(s) to perform the raytracing calculations.

In addition, you can also use CUDA in combination with your CPU device. This is the so-called Hybrid rendering – when CUDA performs raytracing calculations with the CPU, or simultaneously with both the CPU and GPU devices of your computer.

V-Ray GPU supports a variety of features and even more features are added with time.

Although CUDA and RTX share the same user interface as the V-Ray engine, V-Ray GPU differs from the regular V-Ray engine in the way it performs certain calculations. Comparing the results will never come to a one-to-one match, although it may look quite close. Furthermore, it is not the goal for them to be the same.

This is why, it is strongly recommended to not switch between engines in the middle of your project - if you start setting up a scene with the regular V-Ray engine, use it for the entire project. The render settings will only show the available options and your scene will be optimized for GPU rendering.

V-Ray GPU can be used as a production render or in interactive mode to quickly preview scene changes. It also supports both the Progressive and Bucket Image Samplers.

To enable GPU rendering, from V-Ray Asset Editor → Settings tab → Render rollout, select  CUDA or RTX engine. You can use it with both Progressive and Bucket Sampler types.

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||V-Ray Asset Editor|| > Settings > Render > GPU device list (dropdown)

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SketchUp menu Extensions > V-Ray > Tools > External > GPU Device Selection

Or find the vray_gpu_device_select.exe file here C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\V-Ray\V-Ray for SketchUp\extension\vrayappsdk\bin.