beta 2.1 release ETA

[radiance]

Hi all,

We're working very hard on getting the 2.1 RC out.
As most of you will know, we will be offering release candidates to customers as of now.

We're ironing out some final problems and making sure the RC is of good quality.
If things go well, we will post it tomorrow evening (friday evening, central european timezone),
otherwise saturday.
If things get terribly bad it might be monday, but the chance for this is very small.

We've had to make quite a few changes to the render kernels to make them work correctly on the new fermi based GTX400 series,
one advantage is that we've also done some optimizations accross the board that will make the engine faster (also on other cards) in general.

Besides that, another great advantage of 2.1 is that when rendering with more than 1 GPU, you can render at higher resolutions.
eg imagine you have 1024MB video ram, and you have a scene which takes 1023 MB (eg full) with say a 1024x512 resolution film.
If you have 4 GPU's with 1024MB video ram, you can render it at 2048x1024, as the film is divided between cards.

The speedup of additional gpu's is nearly linear, so you can effectively double the speed of octane with a 2nd GPU etc...
Besides all that, this release has many new toys and a LOT of bugfixes and stability improvements.

So let's hope things go smooth for us tomorrow, and the RC is released asap.

Radiance

[pixym]

Thanks for these informations Rad.

[livuxman]

As always, thank you very much for keeping us informed and good luck with the pending changes.

[n1k]

WOW! So much great updates. Can't wait to test it:)

[Kitsune]

Besides that, another great advantage of 2.1 is that when rendering with more than 1 GPU, you can render at higher resolutions.

Is 4096 x 4096 still the hard upper limit of resolution?

Beta 2.2 will have both MLT and automatic video sequence rendering? Once that version is released, Octane is ready to be used in a serious workflow.

[Voidmonster]

Awesome! I'm looking forward to it!

Despite having only one GPU.

Well, I've got a second one, but my motherboard won't take it and it's missing thermal pads on all the ram so it only generates vivid random patterns...

[radiance]

Besides that, another great advantage of 2.1 is that when rendering with more than 1 GPU, you can render at higher resolutions.

Is 4096 x 4096 still the hard upper limit of resolution?

Beta 2.2 will have both MLT and automatic video sequence rendering? Once that version is released, Octane is ready to be used in a serious workflow.

automatic video sequence rendering is already in 2.1. (you'll see there's many suprises in this area).

the 4096x4096 should not be an upper limit.
however i can't promise anything, we need to finish some last bits and do more testing.

Radiance

[Stromberg90]

Looking forward to it
Great work Radiance

[andrian]

WOT I miss THE news ahh that's great.. gimme gimme gimme
Looking forward into this Radiance.

[ttaberna]

I can think how fast you're coding MASTER!!!
Thanks for the fast updates...