NEW: Octane X - is finally here! [MEGA FAQ THREAD] Tweet

[bepeg4d]

I have been waiting Octane for Mac for about 1,5 years. Now, when it is finally here I started to hesitate - should I upgrade my iMacPro to Catalina and use installed Vega Pro 64 and buy one additional RX5700 or maybe calmly stay on my High Sierra and 2 GeForce GTX1070? To be honest, I'm quit tired of outdated OS and would very much like to move to Catalina... but if there is loss in render time and a lot of bugs in Octane X... then downgrading back to High Sierra and installing CUDA and all those other little hacks and tricks to make those GeForce cards work again seems like a work I would like to avoid.
So... is it worth it? Whats your opinion?

You can install Catalina 10.15.6 on another sdd/hdd and try OctaneX with your Vega Pro 64 firstly.
ciao Beppe

[filipw]

I cannot post in the "licensed forum" for some reason so here comes a bug report in this subforum instead. If a moderator would like to move it and grant me persmission to post in the right place, please do so.

I have tested PR1 on my MBP 2017 with dual vega64 egpus. In general I am impressed that so many parts works ok.
But, here comes some bugs/observations: (main focus is to use it in Houdini)

Standalone:
- If I have the rendering window on an external monitor, the IPR update is stuttering and the GPU usage is lowered whuile for example tumbling to camera. Putting the window on the laptop screen again makes the update smooth and nice with full GPU utilization. So, as it is, I have to uncheck rendering from the eGPU that drives the monitor and only utilize the other eGPU for rendering in order to get acceptable interactivity.

Blender
- Works great in general but crashes the server from time to time. Have hard crashed the computer a few times. (lockup, then logged out)

Houdini
- This feels very unfinished. Slow and crashy. Missing Custom IPR window (has to use MPlay instead). IPR needs to be reloaded manually after many operations. Dies a lot even in very simple scenes. I could provide scenes, logs etc if there was a forum/issue tracker. Also, could not get the Houdini/Solaris plugin to work. (it crashes when enabled)

All in all, very close to useful! Please let us know if we can provide meaningful feedback to you for quicker reaching stability.

[modify]

Octane Houdini:
My Hardware: iMac Pro, Vega 64, 10Core + Radeon 5700XT (eGPU)

Because there's no option to send you crash/issue report, I just wanna let you know my first experiences:
''+''
1. eGPU works as expected
2. Rendering on my system is fast and smooth

''-''
1. Octane IPR not work (only MPlay)
2. Very unstable - while rendering, sometimes whole MAC OS system freezes and hard reset is needed
3. After few minutes of work (in 'rendering silence') system logs me out and Otoy watermarks is showed (nevertheless my system is still logged in on website)

Anyway great work and I'm looking forward to fix update of the first public release bugs

[design monkey]

I'd really just like to see the same sort of updates from Goldorak, or others on the team regarding the status of the bug fixes and next workable update like there were prior to the main release. Just because Octane X is technically out doesn't mean I can use it. For me it's like it was never released at all. So I'm still waiting.

[Goldorak]

I'd really just like to see the same sort of updates from Goldorak, or others on the team regarding the status of the bug fixes and next workable update like there were prior to the main release. Just because Octane X is technically out doesn't mean I can use it. For me it's like it was never released at all. So I'm still waiting.

Right now the team is hard at work on Octane X | PR1.1 which will include fixes for the bugs reported to so far in PR1, and integrate general changes/fixes being made in tandem with 2020.1.5 CUDA.


Based on feedback, we are talking to apple/AMD folks about whether it may be possible to back-port some of the metal features to pre-vega GPUs, but it is still not likely to be viable. But we’re going to make 100% sure anyway.

Intel support and other features are being built for macos 11 and being tested internally right now.

[Goldwaters]

Just want to share my experience - coming from a MacBook Pro 13-inch setup (2020) with eGPU Vega 64.

I've used both Blender plugin and Studio standalone and have experienced very few crashes. Octane X on macOS 10.15.6 is extremely fast, smooth, and capable. I've had far more crashes in the past from Blender's EEVEE and even AMD ProRender than I have had with Octane X so far. Kudos to the dev team here for making something quite stable.

My next test bed is the Octane X for Houdini, so I can't speak to that yet but I'm impressed with the Standalone and Blender integration. Also, glad to hear that Intel GPUs will be supported in macOS Big Sur. But sounds like my other eGPU Radeon RX580 is SOL

[design monkey]

I'd really just like to see the same sort of updates from Goldorak, or others on the team regarding the status of the bug fixes and next workable update like there were prior to the main release. Just because Octane X is technically out doesn't mean I can use it. For me it's like it was never released at all. So I'm still waiting.

Right now the team is hard at work on Octane X | PR1.1 which will include fixes for the bugs reported to so far in PR1, and integrate general changes/fixes being made in tandem with 2020.1.5 CUDA.


Based on feedback, we are talking to apple/AMD folks about whether it may be possible to back-port some of the metal features to pre-vega GPUs, but it is still not likely to be viable. But we’re going to make 100% sure anyway.

Intel support and other features are being built for macos 11 and being tested internally right now.

Very cool. Thanks for the update. I'm waiting for C4D fixes personally (R20).

[keithrondinelli1974]

Is the native Cinema 4D noise shader not working in the current plugin build? I'm able to add it to my node editor but it doesn't show up in the render, whether used as displacement or diffuse, etc.

[kartata]

Hey,

first time user here. Really love it so far. Has been running quite stable, despite a few crashes.
My question: Am I seeing this right, that in this developement stage the procedural nodes and shaders and OSL textures don't work? Or is it just me?

Best,
David

[bkindler]

first time user here. Really love it so far. Has been running quite stable, despite a few crashes.
My question: Am I seeing this right, that in this developement stage the procedural nodes and shaders and OSL textures don't work? Or is it just me?

Same here: MacPro, Vega II Pro, Cinema 4D R21