OctaneRender® 2026.1 Beta 2 [current 2026]

Wed Nov 19, 2025 2:02 am

Hi all,

We are excited to bring you the second beta of Octane 2026.1, which we are hoping will be the last one before the 2026.1 stable release.

This build includes a number of fixes many of which were reported by you, so thanks all again for your continuous support in improving Octane.

This also includes the first versions of Octane with internationalization support, currently adding support for Simplified Chinese. We are planning to release these as separate builds, however Studio+ licenses currently allow you access to both and they are both interoperable when using network rendering.

As with all experimental builds, we advise to not use this release for production purposes. We cannot guarantee that scenes saved with this version will be compatible in future releases, but we are trying our best to maintain this compatibility regardless. Please keep in mind that changes are still being made daily although this build already includes pretty much every single feature that will be shipped in the 2026.1 release.

Important notes:

The minimum NVIDIA driver version required has been raised to R535 (R572 for GeForce RTX50 series).
The minimum version of macOS required is 14.5.

Changes since 2026.1 Beta 1

Improvements

Optimized this version's rendering performance for NVIDIA devices for all supported compute models.
Improved output displayed with --help when running via the command line.
OpenPBR metallic mode now supports edge tinting from the specular_color input.

Resolved issues

Fixed application crash upon initializing Octane in some scenarios.
Fixed application crash when using an image tiles node with a grid size that is 1 wide or high, and some tiles are empty.
Fixed issue which may prevent Octane from starting.
Fixed CUDA error when nested dielectrics were disabled in scenes with Gaussian splats.
Fixed issue on maCOS affecting M1/M2 devices causing non-triangle primitives not to be displayed.
Fixed error when enabling network rendering with NRC enabled. The current behavior is that NRC is for local rendering only and will disable network rendering if it is being used.
Fixed application crash when calling the LUA function octane.render.setDevicesActivity without some arguments.
Fixed application crash when a render was stopped when using multi-GPU setups and NRC.
Fixed some changes to input texture on new displacement not causing updates.
Fixed issue causing holes in new displacement especially at higher map resolutions.
Fixed incorrect UVs on surface intersections when using new displacement.
Fixed bright edges on round objects with a specular materials using energy preserving GGX.
Fixed MaterialX nodes splittp, ramptb and ramp4 being vertically flipped
Fixed MaterialX nodes randomfloat and randomcolor integer input value type
Fixed OpenPBR Transmission consideration of scattering, absorption and anisotropy.
Fixed OpenPBR Specular missing for pure Transmission or Subsurface
Fixed OpenPBR node replacement with Standard Surface to better carry over Coat and Thin Film inputs
Fixed some aspects of OpenPBR Subsurface support to better match the standard and better respond to anisotropy.
Fixed application crash happening when an input for a virtual texture had a compressed format.
Fixed unexpected colors in virtual textures if they are built from images with different color types.
Fixed virtual textures becoming black when enabling denoising
Fixed settling of LOD data which often took a long time to settle or didn't settle at all.
Fixed performance regression rendering some Vectron data.
Fixed issue causing the USD importer to terminate before loading all elements.
Fixed issue that would cause the splash screen not to be displayed when opening an ORBX/OCS file via the command line.

Other changes

Removed GPU headroom setting on macOS.
Info AOVs are now rendered while LOD data (meshlets / virtual textures) is settling and if you display them in the viewport. This avoids displaying just a grey image while you are making changes to the scene (e.g. move your camera).

Lua API

The pin name of P_EFFECTS has been changed from "effects " to "effects" (remove trailing space).
Added octane.caches.getMeshletCacheFileName() to determine the file path of the meshlet cache file from a mesh node.
Added octane.caches.clearMeshletCacheFilesForId() to delete all meshlet cache files for a given meshlet mesh ID that are currently not in use.
octane.image.compress() raises an error if compressing the image fails
octane.image.convert() raises an error when conversion is not possible
octane.image.convert() can convert between compressed image formats and uncompressed image formats.

Wed Nov 19, 2025 7:52 pm

Hi,
thanks for the new build.

I've tried new displacement and there are few issues:
- there is no old texture displacement
- viewport performance very bad eg. a mesh with displacement renders with 3 fps and without 40fps
- rendering performance is 4 times slower with displacement enabled
- when quality is set to normal there is no displacement at all

Fri Nov 21, 2025 10:55 am

J.C wrote: Wed Nov 19, 2025 7:52 pm Hi,
thanks for the new build.

I've tried new displacement and there are few issues:
- there is no old texture displacement
- viewport performance very bad eg. a mesh with displacement renders with 3 fps and without 40fps
- rendering performance is 4 times slower with displacement enabled
- when quality is set to normal there is no displacement at all

"Normal" is the old texture displacement.