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Quick test for fun, forgot how slow Maxwell really is
It's really great that we can adjust the sky and sun color in Octane but I think the gradient in Maxwell is nicer (it gets a lot brighter towards the horizon).
Is the sky or the GI in Maxwell brighter? In shadow areas it seems brighter...

The material for the building in the middle has a "grey" value of 220 in Maxwell and a value of 128 in Octane.
Sky and sun color in Octane are default.

Edit: You can render out the Maxwell sky and use it as a sky texture (together with Octane sunlight). With a little bit of adjustment you can get pretty close to the Maxwell output.
You can download the Maxwell sky, I've used the jpg.

Octane Maxwell Octane with Maxwell Sky + Octane Sun

Interesting test and I agree, sky in Maxwell looks more natural and i always found Octane shadows "too dark" with so many GI bounces (i often used like 10+ bounces for exterior) and still find shadow areas too dark in octane. Not sure what's up with that or is there way to change/fix that.

I think you can change the sky color in the Daylight rollout (3dsmax plugin).

mbetke wrote:I think you can change the sky color in the Daylight rollout (3dsmax plugin).

RobSteady wrote:It's really great that we can adjust the sky and sun color in Octane but I think the gradient in Maxwell is nicer (it gets a lot brighter towards the horizon).

Haha, was just cross-reading your post.
Will get more coffee...

I like reflective caustics in maxwell render.

I might have missed it but what were your render times for both frames? I think maxwell looks nicer, but interested to know the time cost to get the result.

Speed compairson should be made by two pros in each render engine.
You need one scene, same textures and compareable material setup without mix material, same camera angle, same features use.
Maxwell can calculate bi-directional pathtracing. You would need a scene not using it to compare it Octane.

I have somthing in mind like using an Evermotion interiour or something like that.

Mostly I see only this basic scenes with one or two textures or scenes made by people working in one engine each day and then they try to built up another scene but dnt know all tricks and features.

Finally you need comparable hardware. of course Octane will be much faster with a 4GPU rig compared to a single CPU rig. So take 4000€ hardware for each GPU and CPU (engine) and see what runs faster.

This test was only about looks in general with a basic scene and default setups to get to the core of each render software.
Completely agree with mbetke, to make a fair comparison you would need an equal hardware setup for both engines and a Maxwell-Pro on the other side.
Octane will still be faster though...
Octane was rendered on one GTX Titan in ~15 min, Maxwell on an i7 2600 in ~80 min.

Out of interest, I would be curious to see the PMC kernel with a high-ish bounce.

I know this will slow things down somewhat, noise wise, but this kernel looks closer to the Maxwell render (as far as light bounce, caustics etc.)