VrayRT- Octane - Arion: my conclusions

[gabrielefx]

After having tried and used these gpu rendering engines I can say that:

The fastest, full featured is Octane.
What I don't like of Octane is the lack of a full integration with 3ds Max, but I hope that Refractive will release soon the promised plugin.
Octane can open really huge scenes without crash and you can rotate them in realtime, sometime faster than the directx shading. I don't like too much overlapping wires connection because you can't zoom in-out the node scheme, you can't optimize connections, you can't rearrange, etc. You can't copy-paste and instance nodes, drag colors between slots.
By the way, the best Octane part is in the material editor. Tons of parameters, you can create infinite (?) nested materials with nodes, you have 3 rendering modes, you can render real caustics. Then we have skyportal material, very useful for well illuminated interior renderings.
The worst Octane part is the impossibility to manage every single name object. You don't have fresnel materials or subscattering options.

Arion has the best control panel, drag and drop materials, fresnel, sss materials, a better way to stack bsdf layers, a better antialiasing, no fireflies in pathtracing.
Arion is hybrid and if you got a renderfarm you can use your gpus. Arion has an offline library very useful.
The best Arion part is in the possibility to do networked rendering, very useful for animations. My dual 3.47Ghz exacore Xeon are equivalent to a one GTX580.
The worst Arion part is that it crashes a lot of time. Ok, I tested the demo beta, but all the analyzed softwares are practically betas.

Vray RT has the best integration with Max, works like Vray legacy, but lacks tons of Vray features.
Crashes with the latest Nvidia drivers. No support for procedural materials (checkerboard, noise, gradient ramps, etc.). No fresnel, no multilayered materials, no skyportals, no real caustics, no hybrid option gpu+cpu that you can turn on with the control panel, you have to add a system variable in windows and often doesn't work. Vray RT 2.0Sp1 is unstable.
The RT cpu part goes in conflict with the gpu engine, so the cpu buckets are different, you get a patchwork like rendering.
I think that Chaos has to do a lot of work with its gpu rendering engine.

The final conclusion is that Octane is the winner.

[Alain]

Thanks for testing.

Kind regards
Alain

[tonycho]

Hi Gabriele
right now RS Team is making Octane integration with 3ds Max. just wait

[Refracty]

By the way, does VR-RT support multiple Graphiccards?

[gabrielefx]

By the way, does VR-RT support multiple Graphiccards?

yep

[Refracty]

Thanks for the detailed information.

[gabrielefx]

Thanks for the detailed information.

oops,
probably you want to know if Vray RT support multiple gpus networked, the answer is yes.
But often this process crashes, I did few tests with one Quadro CX 1.5Gb + GTX 580 1.5Gb + GTX 580 3Gb, not all the networked gpus updated the rendering.

Now I'm deciding whether to buy a Tyan barebone with 8 gpus or a Supermicro with "only" 4 gpus. I want to check the Octane for Max before (when available).

I want to add Octane in my working pipeline. I tested Arion demo 1.5.02, it's not bad but the same scene that I imported in Octane crashed Arion.
Probably Octane optimize the textures automatically lowering the resolution. Many meshes imported in Arion had problems, Octane import everything.
Being both betas Octane surpassed better my stress tests

Arion costs 995€, it's a lot of money, and 245€ for each renderfarm node. I don't know if it supports network rendering to renderize stills, if yes I could use my renderfarm because Arion supports cpu+gpu very well.

To be or not to be....this is the question...

[mbetke]

What about iRay? It runs in 3dsmax and supports lots of GPUs too including interactive viewport if you are on subscription.

[[gk]]

Iray is cool, Ive made a few productions with Iray beeing the main render and octane for fill.