This is another maintenance update of OctaneRender 2.1x. Beside lots of fixes it contains two major changes: The addition of a motion vector render pass and the switch to CUDA 6.5. Let me explain what the switch to CUDA 6.5 means:
Until now, Octane kernels were compiled with CUDA 4.0, which provides a compiler based on Open64. With CUDA 4.1 NVIDIA introduced a new compiler based on LLVM, which produced totally different output and made Octane 10-15% slower. On the other hand, GPUs of newer compute models (like Maxwell) couldn't be built with CUDA 4.0. So we had to use a mix of different toolkits to support the various GPU architectures. Another problem was that on Mac OS you could either use only CUDA 4.0 on Xcode 3 or CUDA 4.1 (or higher) on Xcode 4 (or higher), effectively prohibiting the toolkit mix we used on Windows and Linux (which is the reason why OSX builds didn't have Maxwell support yet).
To fix all that mess and to allow us to do some interesting things in the future, we really needed to switch to a recent toolkit. It took us 3 tries to adapt the code for CUDA 6.5 without a too big performance loss. Since the output of the LLVM based compiler is very different from the old Open64 based compiler (CUDA 4.0), most scenes will render with slightly different speeds compared to version 2.12.1. Some scenes will be faster while others will be slower. It's hard to say what exactly works better/worse, but as a general trend, scenes with instances (i.e. most scenes) often render a bit faster in DL and PT, while single mesh scenes (like the old benchmark) render a bit slower in DL and PT. PMC seems to be a bit slower in most cases. Maxwell 2 GPUs got a lot faster (because of the switch and other optimizations). Let us know if there are any scenes that render significantly (i.e. more than 10%) slower than before.
Due to the switch to CUDA 6.5 you will need a current graphics driver of version 344.x or higher. On Mac OSX you will need a CUDA driver of version 6.5 or higher (see http://www.nvidia.com/object/mac-driver-archive.html). The minimum supported version of Mac OS is 10.7.
Changes since version 2.12.1:
- Switched to CUDA 6.5.
- Improved performance of Maxwell 2 GPUs (GTX 970 and GTX 980).
- Added motion vector render pass.
- Added new option "AO alpha shadows" to info channel kernel. If enabled, opacity is now taken into account in the AO calculation.
- Added option "AO alpha shadows" to the render passes node.
- Sped up processing of HDR textures which should reduce the delay when a scene with many HDR textures is loaded on the GPU.
- On Mac OSX, native file dialogs are used by default.
- Fixed broken motion blur of hair primitives on Linux.
- Fixed displacement "cracks" (see viewtopic.php?f=81&t=43228).
- Fixed memory leak when environment importance sampling is used.
- Fixed incorrect sampling when multiple GPUs with mixed render priorities are used (see viewtopic.php?p=210018#p210018).
- Fixed pausing for the info render passes.
- Fixed emitter sampling of animated meshes (see viewtopic.php?p=209832#p209832).
- Fixed mix material in the AO/wireframe info channel kernels.
- Fixed crash in undo system when specific nodes were deleted while being displayed in the node inspector.
- Fixed crash if a project was opened and rendering got started via the command line and then a new project is loaded via the menu.
- When the software viewport is being used, the background image con now be disabled.
- Added render pass options to the animation render script.
- Added
octane.render.saveRenderPasses()which saves the current render passes as separate files. - Added
octane.file.resolveTemplate()which can be used to resolve file names from a template with placeholders. - Fixed evaluation of render target selection in the batch render script.
- Fixed crash when a tabbed Lua window gets closed.
- Fixed naming of EXR layers in the animation render script.
Minor update of 19/11/2014:
We uploaded a small update (version number didn't change) that fixes two small problem introduced with the release:
- Fixed incorrect export of render passes via Lua scripts (see viewtopic.php?p=211877#p211877).
- Fixed missing bool and annotation nodes in Mac OSX builds (see viewtopic.php?p=211920#p211920).
Download
Windows
- 32-bit ZIP
- 64-bit ZIP
Mac OS X
- 64-bit DMG
Linux
- 64-bit ZIP
Happy rendering,
Your OTOY NZ Team
