Octane X for Mac with AMD!!!

[Weezer]

Well the WWDC Metal session wasn't exactly thrilling. New raytracing API which is great I guess – no idea if OTOY needs it or is using it. Certainly didn't have any Octane goodness on show!

[james_conkle]

Yeah I'm confused at the moment... shouldn't be a surprise though.

[cjadams]

Though if you look at apple's USD/USDZ talk they were using houdini... which is kinda cool

[Weezer]

Care to share a link?

[cjadams]

https://developer.apple.com/wwdc20/10613

[Weezer]

Got it. Certainly seems like AR is a big thing for Apple at the moment.

[cjadams]

I just had a thought.. what if apple made some dedicated RENDER cards.. like a 3d Rendering *Afterburner* card like in their macpro...
And we can have multiple of them via a high speed bus.. as cards or in external render boxes.. bypassing the whole AMD/NVidia thing completely?
Might be interesting. Who knows.. maybe that Afterburner card is really just a large array of FPGA's or something... shrug

[cjadams]

Got it. Certainly seems like AR is a big thing for Apple at the moment.

I think it will be the next "big thing" Apple NEEDED 3d for this AR push! - imagine AR games all the time.. mini apps fly in / fly out - Police glance at a license plate and pull up data.. - Your Doctor can glance at you and have you turn around.. while overlaying 3d scans of your body around you in real space position.. and do a dive in and out of the abstracted data! All of this will be powered of course by iPhones... and things like brigade for real time graphics.. HUDs for your car maps and public transit.. - shopping.. and way points.. remember those apple QR type codes just released and their beacons... this is APPLE playing the LONG GAME and preparing for all of this.. ! Also combine 5G with Powerfull iphones and RNDR you get some interesting things.

This is how i see AR making things work.. where VR kind of has not.

AR has FAR more useful "realworld" applications...

Just my guess..

[Dmikucki]

Having seen the ray-tracing talk, my best guess is that this is the tech OTOY needs to release Octane. They’ve likely had a beta they’ve been building against for some time now, but the API changes have been pushed off to Big Sur. That would explain why the NDA was needed for the private beta. Now we’re probably just waiting for the first Public Beta, which should be coming sometime in July. Unfortunately, that means we’ll probably have to install Big Sur to use it. Although I’ve heard good things about that beta, so maybe it won’t be too bad.

This is wild speculation, but it seems to make sense to me.

[cjadams]

So far Big Sur is fine for me.. nothing major broke other than Little Snitch that i noticed thus far.