OTOY Forums

Hello,

i have to raise a question about the program “OctaneRender”.
A customer wants to buy the Beta Version of “OctaneRender”.
He wants to buy a PC with two graphic cards. Could you approve graphic cards?
How must the two graphic cards be connected? SLI by NVidia?
Would only one graphic card in the PC also work with the programe?
Must have the PC anything special for the programe? (CPU, RAM,…)

I also want to know with which programs does the program work?
Must have the other program anything special?

Does “OctaneRender” works with the programs Blender and Sketchup? This are Freeware programs.

I truly hope you could help me.

>He wants to buy a PC with two graphic cards. Could you approve graphic cards?

Octane works best when you use a different card for the display of the Windows/Octane UI while another card(s) is dedicated to the heavy work of running Octane in Cuda. The display card only needs to be a basic one but it might be a Quadro if it is a workstation.
You might be able to re-use an existing card in this role.
If you want to speed up the rendering you can use more than one render card but they should be identical. It depends what his needs are as to what he should buy but many people are purchasing 2x GTX460/2gb for rendering. A Quadro 600 or GT430 might do among the new cards for the display. You would have to look at this some more to make sure it fits the needs and also power supply and motherboard. Of course the budget matters too. Perhaps 2xGTX480/1.5gb is ok.
More study needed.

>How must the two graphic cards be connected? SLI by NVidia?

Octane does not use SLI but only Nvidia cards are supported.
The same data is loaded into each card vram via pci-e and they run in parallel contributing to the render.
PCI-E slots of 16x,8x are suitable, 4x is 'ok' but not desirable and 1x is not suitable.

>Would only one graphic card in the PC also work with the programe?

Yes if it is sufficiently powerful enough and has a larger vram but it is not the recommended configuration.

>Must have the PC anything special for the programe? (CPU, RAM,…)

Windows 7 64bit and 8 or 12gb ram would be suitable for GTX460/2gb. The CPU is not that important since the work is done in GPU. If the pc is used for other applications then you should buy the CPU to suit that. A dual core is fine for Octane but quad core is a fairly common general solution these days.

>I also want to know with which programs does the program work?
>Must have the other program anything special?
>Does “OctaneRender” works with the programs Blender and Sketchup?

Octane presently uses .obj file format so any application that writes out .obj with .mtl will do.
You might be able to use another application to translate formats if .obj is not native to your application.
There are plugins/scripts available for Max, Maya, Softimage, Blender, Cinema 4D, Sketchup and Modo for licensed customers.

There is some further info in the FAQ and Features pages here:
http://www.refractivesoftware.com/faq.html
http://www.refractivesoftware.com/features.html

Feel free to ask any more question you might have. We are a friendly community.