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

[juhatakabe]

Is there anyone running Octane X with Mac Pro 2013 with eGPU or dual eGPUs? I am wondering how well 5700xt would work using Thunderbolt 2 port. Cheers!

[TBubble]

I'm running Octane X on my traschcan Mac Pro 2013 with a 5700 XT in a Razor eGPU.

It works just fine in standalone working with materials, setting up scenes, but it can hang on more intensive renders and is prone to kernel panics on long renders. Possibly related to the known MacOs bug with Navi GPUs and connecting to TB2 with the Apple TB3-TB2 adapter? For simpler scenes, it does just fine.

I haven't benchmarked it, but in my personal experience it renders at about the same speed as a 1660 TI running Octane 2020.1.5 under Windows.

[pjano]

@pjano: about Shadow Catcher, please try with the following scene:

ShadowCatcherX_PR3.c4d.zip

what is important to check is that the Keep Environment option is disabled, and Alpha Channel enabled, in the Kernel settings:

DDD51BFC-1B18-45C4-8C78-3C758888F5A3.jpeg

ciao Beppe

Thank You Beppe!
It works!

[kinedix]

Am I doing things wrong, or C4D PR3 plugin still not supporting OSL?

Thanks,
Eduard

[bepeg4d]

Hi Eduard,
yes correct, OSL nodes are giving stability issues for now, so better to keep the OSL conversion option disabled, at the moment, in c4doctane Settings/C4D Shaders panel, to be able to use both c4d Gradient and Noise converted into texture, instead of OSL.
The issue will be fixed in the next release.

ciao Beppe

[kinedix]

Beppe I mostly interested in using external OSL shaders, from which we've done for Maya lookdev, but seems like they are not reading at all.

really hope soon they will start supporting.


Thank
Eduard

[kinedix]

@kinedix: please use Octane materials with Octane node only inside, when working with Baking Camera.

ciao Beppe

Yes this what I am using, Octane Material nothing else. will try to attach the scene.

The attachment octane material.jpg is no longer available

PR3 and it still exact the same result( recreated scene from scratch, didn't helped. Light baking still not working properly.



Eduard

[juhatakabe]

I'm running Octane X on my traschcan Mac Pro 2013 with a 5700 XT in a Razor eGPU.

It works just fine in standalone working with materials, setting up scenes, but it can hang on more intensive renders and is prone to kernel panics on long renders. Possibly related to the known MacOs bug with Navi GPUs and connecting to TB2 with the Apple TB3-TB2 adapter? For simpler scenes, it does just fine.

I haven't benchmarked it, but in my personal experience it renders at about the same speed as a 1660 TI running Octane 2020.1.5 under Windows.

Thanks for reply. Sounds like it is still better to stay on High Sierra and 1080Ti combo for while.

[frankmci]

I'm running Octane X on my traschcan Mac Pro 2013 with a 5700 XT in a Razor eGPU.

Interesting. I was under the (apparently false) impression that wasn't an option since Octane X needs Catalina, and that Catalina would not support eGPUs on the 2013 Mac Pros because of the TB2 port limitation, despite using a TB2 to TB3 adapter. Even getting High Sierra to work with TB2 eGPUs requires some system monkey business with scripts from the nice folks over at eGPU.io. We are using a bunch of trash can Macs running High Sierra and various NVIDIA cards, but have done all our Octane X testing on TB3 MacBook Pros and Minis.

Could you elaborate a bit on how you got Octane X running on the 2013 Mac Pro? I might have to re-think our hardware upgrade paths for the next year or so if we can keep using some of these cylinders a bit longer.

[TBubble]

The way I got it up was actually through using the PurgeWrangler scripts. If you check the builds section on eGPU.io, you can find a few builds for the 2013 Mac Pro. Basic steps:

• assemble the eGPU, making sure to use the Apple branded TB2 cable and the TB3-TB2 adapter, leave unplugged for now
• turn off csrutil
• install PurgeWrangler, use manual setup since the AMD Navi GPUs can crash TB2
• Once you've patched Mac OS, plug it in and you're good to go

There are some reports on eGPU.io that using the built-in GPUs and the eGPU simultaneously leads to some instability. Once you get around that Navi/TB2 bug though, it works cold- or hot-plug, so you can either use built-in as usual and only connect the eGPU when needed to render or run the system off the eGPU entirely.