OctaneRender® 2026.2 for 3ds max® v26.6

[Elvissuperstar007]

V-Ray has a tool called V-Ray Lister for convenient management of lights and cameras. I'm not sure if Octane has a similar feature. If not, it would be very useful to add one, as managing a large number of lights and cameras in a scene is currently quite inconvenient.

[ramone163]

Is this error still not fixed?:
Starting with the 2025 versions, there is a problem with VDB files. The parameters, viewport and timeline have started lagging.

[paride4331]

I think I found the reason why 3D Max crashes without a reason, I turned it off Neural radiance cache.
It was enough to turn it off, and for now 3ds Max doesn’t crash. Looks like the issue is specifically in that feature.
No, it’s still crashing, but not as often as it did with that feature enabled.

If the GPU memory consumption shoots up (or crash) when the feature is enabled , please try to lower the max tile sample count.

[Elvissuperstar007]

It crashes even without this function, so it's most likely not related to it. I described the core issue below — it seems something is wrong specifically with Octane. Other plugins in 3ds Max work stable, and Octane 2024 runs fine as well. However, versions 2025 and 2026 crash when enabling or disabling the Octane dynamic viewport.

[remKa]

I had crashes with Octane for months but uninstalling windows 11 january's update and DDU did the trick

[Elvissuperstar007]

This time it's a fresh installation of Windows 11 25H2, downloaded just yesterday from the official Microsoft website. The system is completely clean, but the interface is lagging and stuttering.

I’ve encountered this issue before in one of the previous builds with OctaneRender, and it was fixed back then. Now the bug has returned.

[coilbook]

Why does OctaneRender spend 43 seconds per frame rendering an empty screen before the mesh even appears in the camera view? (A simple mesh is in the scene but hasn’t yet entered the camera frame.) This issue has been happening for years. Rendering an empty screen takes a lot of time. Since the introduction of parallel samples and other VRAM-consuming features like AI light and the denoiser, your software has become too bloated. We lost a lot of VRAM for denoiser and AI light, so in the end we didn’t gain much—just the same speed.

[paride4331]

This time it's a fresh installation of Windows 11 25H2, downloaded just yesterday from the official Microsoft website. The system is completely clean, but the interface is lagging and stuttering.

I’ve encountered this issue before in one of the previous builds with OctaneRender, and it was fixed back then. Now the bug has returned.

Hi Elvissuperstar007,
The UI lag on a clean installation of Windows 11 25H2 with a Xeon E5-2690 v2 is a behavior that’s been reported by users with similar architectures running Windows 11. It generally comes down to two main causes.
The first is VBS (Virtualization-Based Security), which is enabled by default. Windows 11 25H2 turns it on automatically, but the Xeon E5-2690 v2, being based on Ivy Bridge, doesn’t support MBEC (Mode-Based Execution Control), which is only available starting with 7th-gen Intel CPUs. Without MBEC, the virtualization layer has a much heavier impact on system responsiveness. You can try the following: open Settings, go to Privacy & Security > Windows Security, then click “Open Windows Security.” From there, go to Device Security, click on “Core isolation details,” and turn off “Memory integrity.” Then restart your PC. To verify that it’s actually disabled, press Win + R, type msinfo32, and hit Enter. In the window that opens, look for “Virtualization-based security”, it should say “Not enabled.” The second cause is the Power Plan being set to Balanced. On X79 platforms, this plan doesn’t handle CPU frequency scaling well when idle, which can cause visible micro-lag when moving windows or navigating the interface. Try switching the power plan to High Performance. After these two changes, the UI should feel responsive again. Also, make sure to install NVIDIA drivers directly from the NVIDIA website, rather than using the ones provided through Windows Update.
Regards
Paride

[paride4331]

Why does OctaneRender spend 43 seconds per frame rendering an empty screen before the mesh even appears in the camera view? (A simple mesh is in the scene but hasn’t yet entered the camera frame.) This issue has been happening for years. Rendering an empty screen takes a lot of time. Since the introduction of parallel samples and other VRAM-consuming features like AI light and the denoiser, your software has become too bloated. We lost a lot of VRAM for denoiser and AI light, so in the end we didn’t gain much—just the same speed.

Hi coilbook,
Try these changes and compare the results. Switch from the Octane AI Denoiser to Open Image Denoise, which in my tests turned out to be significantly lighter in terms of per-frame overhead. Also make sure that Denoise on Completion is turned on, because with it off the denoiser runs intermediate passes during sampling that can add a lot of unnecessary time. If you're not relying on AI Light for the scene, try disabling it as well, it reserves VRAM and adds its own per-frame recalculation cost that on simpler frames might not be worth it. Finally, try raising the Adaptive Sampling Noise Threshold, with Open Image Denoise handling the cleanup at the end, you might be able to push it higher than usual without visible quality loss. Start from something like 0.05 or 0.06 and go up from there. The engine will stop sampling earlier and the denoiser takes care of the residual noise. This combination could cut your frame times quite a bit, especially on simpler frames. Worth testing on your specific scene to see how far you can push the threshold before the quality starts to drop.
Regards
Paride

[coilbook]

Hi,
How do you adjust sampling rate for fire (light) using std volume medium?