If you're changing the coordinates in a modifier or the base object then it will cause a geometry update, but if you're doing it in the shader, it should be... well... shader based, so it would indeed be odd if theres a full update.

Much of this might apply to Octane itself and not the plugin, but I'm reviewing it from the point of view of the workflow in 3dsMax. I really love it, but here are some things that stand out:

1) When rendering a large scene, it can take a while for the Octane Viewport to update. During this time ...

After playing about tonight after a year or so of not using Octane, this jumped out at me when trying to do a timber floor. 0.001 gave me what I'd expect to get at 0.95 or so in vray, so 0.05 in octane. To solve compatibility, just fix settings in scenes saved with older versions.

I really don't think that market segmentation is going to fly. For a while now, games have used Compute Shaders and CUDA acceleration for the heavier things (FFT, etc.), so the gaming community will demand their cards perform in this area.

Can't Octane use double-precision FP?

And with the 3GB 580's, who needs a Tesla? They're a waste of money unless you're doing double precision calculations.

Is it possible via some kinda SDK to make our own implementations of certain 3dsmax maps? For example, BerconMaps are open source and thus could be adapted as CUDA kernels.

(Almost a copy of CGtextures.com

Brick
-Old
-Floors
--Patterns
--Regular
-Modern Large
--Clean
--Dirty
--Painted
--Patterns
-Modern Small
--Clean
--Dirty
--Painted
--Patterns

Concrete
-Clean
-Dirty
-Floors
-Painted

Marble

Metal
-Clean
-Dirty
-Floors
-Plates
-Features(Beams, bolts, etc.)

Nature ...

Hopefully Octane continues to be unafraid of biased methods, and keeps including features for early ray termination and other adaptive things!

I also find the sun direction in Octane is completely different to that setup in Max or Sketchup. ie. 9AM in Melbourne, Australia (GMT+10) is different to the consistent results I get in Max/Sketchup.