- OCTANE RENDER SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS DRIVERS
- OCTANE RENDER SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS SOFTWARE
- OCTANE RENDER SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS WINDOWS
Since starting this review Octane introduced a Low Priority option to help maintain screen responsiveness and usable interactivity. It’s a great compromise if your hardware supports it, and Octane ran exceptionally well using this setup.
OCTANE RENDER SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS DRIVERS
This was as simple as making sure the drivers were up to date and turning on a couple of settings in the BIOS. Fortunately, thanks to a tip from Tom Glimps, it was possible to use the motherboard’s built in Lucid Virtu technology to use the IGPU to run the system, leaving the 560ti to deal with rendering. To counter this, Otoy recommend a dual card setup with one running the monitors and at least one more card dedicated to rendering. In early tests it was obvious that Octane was pushing the machine to its limits, the screen became intermittently unresponsive – the promise of real time interaction seemed unlikely. Octane Render was reviewed on a single, fairly modest, mid range 560ti card with 2gb of VRAM. Multiple cards can be managed from the CUDA Devices tab where each card can be easily activated or deactivated with a simple tickbox.
Cards models can be comfortably mixed in the same system too, and there’s no need to use SLI. Moreover, adding cards to a system results in a linear performance increase, meaning two identical cards will give twice the performance of one. Octane will however work relatively well even on older cards, 8000 and up and a minimum of 96 CUDA cores are cited, as well as high end Quadros and Teslas. OpenCL is not compatible, though according to the Octane FAQ there are plans to support it when the technology matures. Octane uses a custom CUDA implementation and therefore requires an NVidia card to run. Finally, it’s interactive, being able to use the OctaneRender viewport to place lights, edit materials and frame a composition in real-time is a game changer. It can take years to become proficient with V-Ray, but decent results can be achieved with Octane almost immediately. It’s not all about speed though, if you’re coming from a biased renderer you’ll probably find it much easier to use. The developers claim speed gains of 10x–50x Compared to CPU based unbiased renderers – dependent of course on hardware – with 10x–15x speed increases to be expected. What this means in real terms is that Octane can produce some stunning images rather quickly. GPU based renderers’ great promise it to overcome this hurdle using the massive parallel processing power of modern video cards. The downside is usually a significant increase in render times needed to clear the noise that comes with using unbiased algorithms. The advantage of using a physically accurate render is the ease with which photoreal images can be created without needing to learn the hundreds of esoteric parameters needed to master a biased renderer. Octane used for architectural visualization – This review will be focusing on the 3DS Max plugin, though many of the same features are present no matter the platform. and a competitively priced cloud-based edition to be released later this year.
OCTANE RENDER SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS WINDOWS
The renderer comes in many flavours: as a standalone application for OSX, Windows and Linux an expanding roster of plugins that bring native Octane rendering to 3DS Max, Maya, Lightwave, Cinema 4D, Autocad, Softimage, etc.
OCTANE RENDER SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS SOFTWARE
In March 2012 Refractive Software was bought by Otoy, developers of LightStage and Octane’s sister product Brigade, a real time GPU-based cloud game engine. Octane started life as a product of Refractive Software, founded by Terrence Vergauwen, a key developer of LuxRender. And now Octane Render is fresh out of commercial beta promising ease of use, interactivity, integration into a wide range of applications and the claim of being “the first GPU based, un-biased, physically accurate renderer on the market”. The list is already long: Mental Ray, V-Ray, Maxwell, IRay, Indigo, FinalRender, Arion, Thea, Corona, FurryBall GPU on the horizon, etc. When it comes to renderers, 3DS Max users have never had so much choice.