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

[atoyuser1]

Yeah I'm def jumping ship for Redshift. Literally years of using betas with promises that any day now things will be great. My studio needs stable Maya/Houdini MacOS/AMD rendering.

Heh. The RS forum is full of users complaining about instability on Mac/AMD.

The problem is Apple. They have a hit on their hands will M1/M2 and have zero motivation to bother with other people's hardware.

Thanks for this, very interesting...

[VinsG1]

This is latest OctaneX based 2022.1-XB3 and it's just for M1 Macs right now. It matches the latest development version.

viewtopic.php?f=85&t=80247

Thank you for this headup !
Do we know if the Denoiser is now possible on Apple M1 Pro ?
I've just updated from C4D_OctaneX_Enterprise_ProMac_PR14. to this new one but I can't get the denoiser to work...

[danchosich]

It's all very confusing because I don't know how you'd do production work on M1 Macs. I can't figure that one out.

There isn't enough GPU power for anything animated that has volumetric light and a 4K resolution. It's very possible that OTOY knows something about the M2 chips. Maybe they will have a thunderbolt controller that can handle eGPUs--I think they should but it's up to Apple to actually support it--more likely that Apple creates their own GPU. It's just utterly confusing to drop AMD support because cards like the 6800 and 6900 are incredibly capable.

Again, not mad at Aoktar. Very thankful for your time, but I hope there is something that can be done to support the 2019 Mac Pro. I've literally spent 50K+ on this machine to do work thinking it would serve me well for Octane X. It just sucks knowing I'm probably going to have to bite the bullet here and switch to PC or something that has greater developer support--even if that means the M2 or something similar. And even then I have a hard time believing Apple will have extremely better GPUs than Nvidia or AMD. Their graphs comparing their (M1) cards to 3090s are simply based on power consumption versus raw compute.

[3dworks]

It's all very confusing because I don't know how you'd do production work on M1 Macs. I can't figure that one out.

There isn't enough GPU power for anything animated that has volumetric light and a 4K resolution. It's very possible that OTOY knows something about the M2 chips. Maybe they will have a thunderbolt controller that can handle eGPUs--I think they should but it's up to Apple to actually support it--more likely that Apple creates their own GPU. It's just utterly confusing to drop AMD support because cards like the 6800 and 6900 are incredibly capable.

Again, not mad at Aoktar. Very thankful for your time, but I hope there is something that can be done to support the 2019 Mac Pro. I've literally spent 50K+ on this machine to do work thinking it would serve me well for Octane X. It just sucks knowing I'm probably going to have to bite the bullet here and switch to PC or something that has greater developer support--even if that means the M2 or something similar. And even then I have a hard time believing Apple will have extremely better GPUs than Nvidia or AMD. Their graphs comparing their (M1) cards to 3090s are simply based on power consumption versus raw compute.

I totally second all this!

[aoktar]

Giving support for old Mac's are not a plugin developer related topic. Codes are ready to run on every platform on plugin side. But as I can understand that renderer has been isolated to run on ARM GPUs for adopting to Apple's roadmap. It required to write everything for Metal API as I can know to go further. Please Otoy team correct me if I'm wrong on this.
So for now you should be able to use old plugins with old Mac's and you need new builds for new ARM Mac's. That's all unless the situation changed.

[tripledistilled]

It's all very confusing because I don't know how you'd do production work on M1 Macs. I can't figure that one out.

Depends on what you're doing. M1 is great for layout, lighting, lookdev and static renders (I'm not going above 4K). It is my go-to nowadays especially with electricity prices rising (arm64 is cheaper to run) and lower temperatures make it more comfortable to use during a heatwave.

For larger static renders and animations send .orbx to RNDR network. Easy.

[TBubble]

Depends on what you're doing. M1 is great for layout, lighting, lookdev and static renders (I'm not going above 4K). It is my go-to nowadays especially with electricity prices rising (arm64 is cheaper to run) and lower temperatures make it more comfortable to use during a heatwave.

For larger static renders and animations send .orbx to RNDR network. Easy.

How is any solution that requires customers buy new hardware, and then still hand Otoy their cash (I'm sorry, "a small percentage of RNDR for facilitating the transaction and running the Render Network"), easy? Somehow I'm remembering something about the promise of rendering on any device and "fully optimized for performance on AMD Vega and Navi GPUs." And after the very righteous collapse of the NFT market, we're still going to push RNDR is the answer?

This is not how you democratize content creation.

[tripledistilled]

How is any solution that requires customers buy new hardware, and then still hand Otoy their cash (I'm sorry, "a small percentage of RNDR for facilitating the transaction and running the Render Network"), easy?

Like I said, Apple Silicon is cheaper to run. For me it is a good investment.

Somehow I'm remembering something about the promise of rendering on any device and "fully optimized for performance on AMD Vega and Navi GPUs." And after the very righteous collapse of the NFT market, we're still going to push RNDR is the answer?

I don't know about crypto or NFT stuff. To me, RNDR is just a very good render farm. Buy credits. Render stuff. It is the easiest cloud solution I have found (although Chaos Cloud is also similarly straighforward).

This is not how you democratize content creation.

An affordable render farm means creators don't have to spend thousands on hardware - author content on a fanless laptop, then leverage the full power of the cloud to get stuff done. Lower upfront costs are democratising content creation.

[TBubble]

We're obviously going to disagree, and I have no intention to convince you.

All I can say is that I'm deeply frustrated with Otoy because, at least where I teach, students are not going to be able to run out and buy Apple Silicon nor is the college going to replace Mac Pros that were supposed to have a working life longer than 18 months. I'm also sensitive to the reality that very few of them have or will be buying tokens. Progressively narrowing the number of supported devices, requiring investments in new equipment (even if that cost could be amortized over time by being cheaper to run), and then still have to supplement the new purchases with cloud-based rendering? RNDR may be a good render farm, but it certainly isn't democratizing things for my students.

Otoy needs a better answer, and a better roadmap, than what they've shown so far.

[james_conkle]

Does anyone know of a place that is recording Octane X benchmark scores? I know the official OB isn't on 2022 yet, but there was a chess scene going around for a while.