i discovered a free version of octane render in LW2024 and thought i would try it out, and perhaps buy a license.
after setting it up, i found the render results were pretty wonky. After a lot of back and forth, I then found that I could use a benchmark tool but it told me my GPU was not supported, although the plugin itself had nothing to say about this at all.
After additional back and forth, it was suggested to run an older version of the benchmarking tool, which ran just fine.
Then i was told that the results of all this investigation proved my Nvidia driver was too old to run the version of octane i have in LightWave.
but according to the hardware recommendations on the website, I have a newer driver than the suggested driver. that information is dated from less than one month ago, so I consider that reasonably current information:
https://help.otoy.com/hc/en-us/articles/214357103-Hardware-Suggestions
"Hardware Suggestions
Kevin
Updated 26 days ago
Octane v2025 supports GPU cards ranging from Kepler GPUs (3.5 and above) as the minimum requirement to RTX 4xxx GPUs.
The minimum NVIDIA driver is 456.38 or newer for Windows..."
What I have running is a game ready driver, v522.25 with a pair of Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080's {I wish I could afford a new machine and new GPUs but this is what I have and the box at least runs very well despite its age].
I have always been very concerned about updating my GPU driver since an incident several years ago, when a seemingly harmless GPU driver update utterly destroyed my computer, necessitating blanking the hard drive, reinstalling windows and starting everything from scratch with reinstalling all my software.
It took numerous attempts to get it back to normal where this had to be repeated before i found a much older driver ultimately worked for me, so changing m,y driver always gives me goosebumps.
I cannot test this renderer at all unless I update my driver [as support suggests] but this contracts the information on the recommended hardware page, so I am not really sure if it really is necessary.
The entire issue with driver updates was not on my mind at all, because my entire problem was that the documentation tells me that i am supposed to be going to the octane editor settings to rig everything up [its node editor] however I don't have this option at all- those tools are completely grey'd out in the LightWave GUI (not accessible).
Support has yet to respond to this issue, but everything they have been talking about to me has been limited to the GPU driver alone being too old to run the plugin.
But to me it seems that the plugin itself is what makes the octane editor's toolset available in the GUI, and not the driver, since what the GPU driver does is run the GPU alone (ie rendering).
So I am trying to get down to the bottom of all this; is there an issue with the plugin or is there an issue with my GPU driver being a mismatch?
- Is the plugin not telling me that my GPU driver out of date or my GPUs are too old the issue when it is in fact too old?
- Is the GPU simple not supported despite the plugin not telling me it is, and the suggested hardware showing that it is supported, along with the driver I use?
- Because the plugin does not give me any warnings at all, and recognizes both GPUs - it just renders wonky results and i think this is because i was just using the default settings from the lightrwave renderer and octane renderer plugin control windows in the usual LW GUI, since it doesn't let me get into the octane editor tools--- because those are simply unavailable (some are visible not not the full set as the documentation shows I should see).
So now what? can anybody shed some light on this????
I'd love to post some screengrabs to illustrate all this more clearly but this interface in the forum is too confusing and so I have zero understanding of how to go about doing that.
apologies for the long word salad but it is just too much information and i am getting nowhere.
