NVIDIA is the latest high profile company now contributing significant funds for advancing the open-source Blender 3D modeling software.
NVIDIA has joined Epic Games at the premiere "patron" level in which they are contributing at least €120k per year. NVIDIA and Epic are the two companies contributing the most to Blender's Development Fund but also making significant contributions are the likes of Ubisoft, Google, Ubuntu, Intel Software, Valve, and others.
Blender shared that NVIDIA's contributions will allow two more developers to work on Blender full-time and helping to ensure NVIDIA GPU technology is well supported.
Blender already supports CUDA and OpenCL well with NVIDIA GPUs while Blender 2.81 already has an RTX OptiX back-end for NVIDIA Turing GPUs that was contributed by the company.
Sources:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Funding-Blender
https://www.blendernation.com/2019/10/07/nvidia-joins-blender-development-fund/
