Makes sense to switch back to Octane Blender

[davorin]

Evening (o;

BTW...what are VDB files? Something to do with Houdini? Wonder how it is related to Blender then (o;

Anyway....gonna subscribe for a month now tomorrow (already late evening here ;o) and see how it performs compared to E_Cycles RTX 2020....

[davorin]

Good morning

Just received my NVLink adapter, plugged it in and booted Debian 10.2...seems to active without doing anything (o;

Code: Select all

klingler@blender:~$ nvidia-smi nvlink --status
GPU 0: GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (UUID: GPU-b2771ad4-eaad-be2f-117b-edca7ec2ecd2)
	 Link 0: 25.781 GB/s
	 Link 1: 25.781 GB/s
GPU 1: GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (UUID: GPU-a7745dce-773d-0aec-bfc6-31c1deac9d8d)
	 Link 0: 25.781 GB/s
	 Link 1: 25.781 GB/s

[J.C]

Evening (o;

BTW...what are VDB files? Something to do with Houdini? Wonder how it is related to Blender then (o;

Anyway....gonna subscribe for a month now tomorrow (already late evening here ;o) and see how it performs compared to E_Cycles RTX 2020....

You nee to have VDB files created in other software like Houdini or Spectron. To use them in Octane you need to create a simple object eg plane and in Octane properties you need to attach a VDB file to it. Toggle "Use as Octane VDB" and setup a Volume material to it:

[linograndiotoy]

You nee to have VDB files created in other software like Houdini or Spectron.

Well, you can create VDB files in Blender using Smoke.

[FrankPooleFloating]

Octane is way faster than E-Cycles, the AI Denoiser is doing an amazing job, there's NVLink and RTX support and a lot of optimizations you can only find in the OTOY Blender custom build.
Especially with this new release, I feel we reached an extremely exciting productivity level.

That's a bold statement friend. Time for a real head-to-head throw-down between E-Cycles and Octane Blender. I'll ask Mathieu if he is interested.

Regardless, I'm rendering my animations at a couples secs per frame on my three 2070 Supers with E-Cycles RTX. Plenty fast enough for me. And also banging out high-res stills for print like an effing champ. And this is in piping-hot 2.83 builds fresh out of the oven and no need to convert any mats... If I ever need Vectron or some shit like that, I'll fire up my subscription again. Until then, I am good-to-go with Blender E-Cycles (and Octane 4 for re-rendering old LW gigs - yuck!). Good luck to you gents.

[linograndiotoy]

That's a bold statement friend. Time for a real head-to-head throw-down between E-Cycles and Octane Blender. I'll ask Mathieu if he is interested.

That's what I experienced in my tests. I'll make some more comparisons.

[Obizzz]

Not everything is about render speed.

I've yet to see a Cycles render match the quality of what Octane can do. Especially when you do in render DoF.

It might not be by much but Octane still beats Cycles when it comes to realism.

[FrankPooleFloating]

It might not be by much but Octane still beats Cycles when it comes to realism.

Okay. Octane's more real than real. Kinda like "more human than human". Gotcha.

[Obizzz]

It might not be by much but Octane still beats Cycles when it comes to realism.

Okay. Octane's more real than real. Kinda like "more human than human". Gotcha.

More like Cycles is not quite there.

[J.C]

...

Anyway....gonna subscribe for a month now tomorrow (already late evening here ;o) and see how it performs compared to E_Cycles RTX 2020....

In a scene I tested E-cycles is 10-15% faster than Octane.
Official Cycles Blender build is almost two times slower compared to the fastest e-cycles – 59 sec. vs 35 sec.

Blender 2.82, Cycles, OPTIX RTX, 58 sec:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

E-Cycles, CUDA, 1:36 sec:

E-Cycles, OPTIX RTX, Medium Preset, 20 sec.:

E-Cycles, OPTIX RTX, Slow Preset, 35 sec.:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Octane, PT kernel, CUDA, 59 sec.:

Octane, Direct light kernel, OPTIX RTX, 27 sec.:

Octane, PT kernel, OPTIX RTX, 40 sec: