OTOY Forums

Hi everybody! Longtime Octane user here and I really love it.

I do have a question as I would love some insight from the forum since everyone is so knowledgable. After considerable search and perusing, I didnt really find the definitive answers that I was seeking.

I am often pushing Octane to the limits in my 3D art (high frame rate, caustics/glass, high samples) and I am upgrading my computer.

I am looking to get a new Mac Pro, with Two Radeon Pro Vega II Duo cards. I am after some basic information if this is worth the money. My question is about if Octane is optimized for 2 dual cards? I would love to have a machine that is super fast but I am also a big user of RNDR so I am trying to get an idea whether its worth for me to invest in a machine that can render on its own or perhaps slim down the specs and keep using RNDR.

For what its worth, I considered a deep learning machine by Lambda Labs (pretty much the same price). However, being a longtime Mac user I am biased to stick with Mac! Although very tempting to try out StyleGan haha.

If anyone could lend some professional advice I would be most grateful!

Thank you!

Hi,
yes sure, OctaneRender scales almost liearly, so, if you add a second GPU of the same type, you will go 2x faster, and so on.

Here you can fins a test made by a Mac Pro user with 2x Radeon Pro II Duo, so 4x GPUs:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=75411&start=730#p400159

Unfortunately we need to wait for 2021.1 stable SDK, to have an OctaneBench version supporting both CUDA and Metal GPUs, for a precise comparison, but in the meantime, we are trying to have an idea of the speed with this simple test here:
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=75411&start=700#p399724

Here is what we have found so far:


New Big Navi21 GPUs, like RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT, are the best option for price/performance, at the moment, even if you need to consider that they have 16GB of VRAM, while Radeon Pro II has 32GB of VRAM, so double space for scene complexity.

Happy Mac GPU rendering,
ciao Beppe

Thank you for this insight! Super helpful