OTOY Forums

Hello community! I`m very new here, and to the gpu-rendering market... I`ve been a advent of cpu rendering for some years now, tho!

I recently bought a gtx 690 and stumbled upon octane render-er and thought I gave it a shot. I downloaded the demo version, watched the nice video tutorials you guys did just to get the hang of it. But when I tried to click on the node(to render the object I imported) it said that it failed.

Will there be an update incorporating the new kepler stuff? I would sure buy a licence then. And if there is a plan for that, can I subscribe to a newsletter to find out when it comes out?

Thanks for your time reading!(and responding)

Alex

At the moment the 6xx serie isn't supported jet.
The developers don't know when this will be.
It can easily be another 4 months when this will be ready.
But maybe sooner, today we know that the 6xx will preform better under cuda 5.0 instead of cuda 4.2.

I see, thanks for the response... so would you think is better to sell this GTX 690 and buy lets say one or two GTX 680 maybe the 4 GB model?

Would really love to hear if Octane would take advantage of the GTX 690`s 4GB or not...

Thank you!

Alex

Alex

This is the current state of play at this moment.

1) Octane currently works using Cuda 4.0 /. 4.2 . It works well using last gen Fermi GPU's ie 4xx / 5xx cards.

2) Refractive are doing test builds for 6xx Kepler cards using Cuda 4.2 but as of last nights build they are slower than the last gen Fermi cards.

3) The recently announced Cuda 5 for Kepler might be the answer to the speed issue if and when they get their hands on it .The problem is that the demo which you've been trying out was built for Fermi , not Kepler.Hence why it wont work on any 6xx cards.Not sure when or if a demo version will be built for Kepler.

4) In answer to your question, i'd suggest holding onto your 690 for the moment and try and run the demo on any machine that you can get hold of that has a 5xx or earlier card. If you like what you see then Purchase the software and run the latest Kepler build on the 690.It will work , probably just not as fast as an old 580 card at the moment.Thing's should improve in time, but that's just my guess.That's the problem with running cutting edge hardware and software !

5) The other thing you need to understand is that the 690 like the 590 before it has 4Gb of memory , but that's split to service the 2 x GPU's on the card.As scenes in octane have to fully fit into the cards available memory to be rendered by the GPU. The 690 is really like having 2 x 680's installed and therefore can only fit scenes up to 2gb into the cards memory.unlike the 4gb 680's that are just starting to appear.With these you could fit in a much larger scene to be rendered.

Hey thanks so much for the reply.

Nvidia did relese a alpha or beta driver that installed CUDA 5.1 for the 6xx cards(driver version 302.59) .... it works fine for me, but no software to test it on... I will instantly buy Octane when the developers take advantage of Kepler, can`t wait for that