1. Make sure Use priority is set to Off. This may reserve some GPU resources to other apps so Octane won't utilize GPU at 100%
2. In Blender settings optix and cuda options are for Cycles not Octane. Octane has its own GPU settings in Octane Server settings.
3. Make sure you disable Octane denoiser ...

Could you kindly help point me in the right direction as to which settings I should look at?
Kernel settings are exactly the same. No aov's on both. I mached windows sizes on both and as far as I know everything should be exactly the same.
In blender settings I tried to switch between optix and cuda ...

I noticed that cinema 4d live viewer was working much faster than blenders. So I decided to make a comparison and it is more than twice as slow. I matched the window sizes and everything else. Is this normal behavior or am I missing something?

I attached the scene files

https://imgur.com/a/tIKhV8N ...