[Help!] Bizarre change to the PMC Caustics after Updating

[Draydin_r]

So, after getting my 3080 I wanted to test it out on something tricky. On that end after downloading RC7 and updating the Nvidia driver to 461.40, I'm seeing some really weird caustic light transmission from the PMC kernel. Caustics seem to be extremely diffused and soft rather than the stronger and sharper results I was expecting.
Before:

After:

Note the difference on all specular reflections, indirect lighting and the caustic coloring.

Normally I wouldn't worry so much, as I could just go back to the XB1 to continue where I left off..... but it seems like the issue now persisting even with XB1.

I tried reinstalling the older drivers I had (460.89) but the problem still persists. I even tried getting rid of the CudaDNN update that the new octane version installed.... Nothing seems to have worked.

Has anyone seen anything like this before? As one can imagine this is quite concerning, as this kind of completely seems to have changed the expected out come of octanes output. Is there something I've missed in resolving this issue, something that could have gotten mucked up by either of these updates?

Draydin_r

[Draydin_r]

After testing with other renderers, I can now confirm that something is amiss with Nvidia's latest drivers and something occurs that prevent is form being resolved by reinstalling old drivers..... Can anyone confirm this (or is willing to verify)?

[nuno1980]

The difference of brightness between the full screen rendered and the region picking rendered is almost none, low or high because -> not graphics driver issue but yes PMC implementation issue - v2.x and any version (since 2011 as new PMC kernel launched) too.

[Draydin_r]

Actually with the tests done with Unity, Unreal and Octane it was a Driver update issue. Each rendered lighting slightly differently (often brighter) than what they has done prior (we tested it with previous builds on our SVN).

Sadly, when post driver update, 4 separate programs produce different results when rendering lighting, it's likely a driver issue