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Octane X | PR1 is out for macOS Catalina!

Topics: OctaneRender, Company News
Jul. 20, 2020 (4 years)

LOS ANGELES, CA – July 20th, 2020 — OTOY, Inc. is very proud to launch the first public preview of Octane X on macOS, introducing the leading unbiased GPU renderer to millions of Macs powered by Apple’s Metal graphics technology – and delivering the industry’s fastest OctaneBench score ever recorded for a single board graphics card*.

Octane X is fully compatible with macOS Catalina and will be available for free** for new users on Macs with the release of macOS Big Sur coming this fall.

Octane X was introduced to the world during the opening keynote at Apple’s 2019 Worldwide Developer Conference.

Today OTOY is releasing the first public preview (PR1) of Octane X for macOS Catalina 10.15.6 – completely rebuilt from the ground up using Apple’s Metal Graphics API, and fully optimized for performance on AMD Vega and Navi GPUs across the Mac Pro, iMac Pro, iMac and MacBook Pro product lines.

“Using Octane has been at the cornerstone of swatchbook’s material visualization for years. Moving to Octane X on macOS Metal has been totally seamless. For the first time, all our GPU rendering in Octane can be done on our MacBook Pros from anywhere in the world,” said Yazan Malkosh, Founder and CEO of swatchbook.

 

 

“Finally being able to use Octane X on the latest generation of macOS hardware and software is a godsend. I’ve been an Apple desktop user for more than 20 years and seeing Apple and OTOY embrace 3D artists as creative professionals on their platform is a milestone for me. I can’t wait to make Octane X a cornerstone of my workflow,” said Jan Urschel, Creative Director at Hendrix Design.

The public release of Octane X marks a major milestone in OTOY’s ongoing work and years of close collaboration with Apple’s world class graphics and engineering teams in exploring how OTOY’s GPU technologies – including RNDR, Brigade, EmberGenFX and Sculptron – can reach millions of new users through Apple’s Metal API.

Octane X features over a dozen integrated plug-ins for the most popular macOS 3D content creation tools in motion graphics, design, product visualization and VFX – including Maxon Cinema 4D, SideFX Houdini and Autodesk Maya.

Octane X | PR1 ships with full support for RNDR – the first distributed GPU rendering platform – enabling artists to effortlessly scale their rendering jobs through the massive processing power available through decentralized GPUs.

“Like so many Octane artists, I began my journey in computer graphics on the Mac,” said Jules Urbach, CEO of OTOY. “I started OTOY to democratize content creation, imagining that artists might one day render 3D graphics at the same fidelity as Hollywood blockbusters – but on any budget, in real time and from anywhere in the world. Integrating OTOY’s rendering technology natively on Apple hardware, and empowering hundreds of millions of potential new creators, is a huge step towards realizing this dream – one we’ve been working on for nearly a decade to make happen here at OTOY.”

Octane X on Mac Pro Features

  • Completely rewritten mesh geometry engine optimized for AMD GPUs, supporting hundreds of millions of unique primitives per mesh instance, at high performance.

  • Near perfect linear scaling of rendering speed with multiple GPU configurations, including eGPUs connected over Thunderbolt 3.

  • Octane X RNDR server / Mac Pro as a render node: Leveraging 20Gb/s dual interconnect – the Mac Pro approaches InfiniBand interconnect speeds – and Octane X on Mac Pro will support up to 400 GPUs over network rendering.

  • 56 Xeon CPU threads with up to 1.5TB of out-of-core memory surpasses (by far) the maximum scene capacity available on even the most expensive GPU rendering nodes on the public cloud.

* Ranking based on an OctaneBench (V4) score of 415 OB recorded by OTOY on the Apple Radeon Pro Vega II Duo MPX Module (default clock speeds, Mac Pro / macOS 10.15.6, Octane X | PR1), relative to the top score of 401 OB, as of July 20, 2020, listed on the public OctaneBench single GPU benchmark here.

** Octane X | PR1 is available today for current OctaneRender Studio and Enterprise subscribers. In the coming months, a full commercial version of Octane X, with one year of maintenance, will be made available – for free – to all new users activating Octane X on 2019 or later models of Mac Pro, iMac and MacBook Pro running macOS Big Sur.

About OTOY Inc.

OTOY Inc. is the definitive cloud graphics company, pioneering technology that is redefining content creation and delivery for media and entertainment organizations around the world. OTOY’s Academy Award®-winning technology is used by leading visual effects studios, artists, animators, designers, architects, and engineers, providing unprecedented creative freedom, new levels of realism, and new economics in content creation and distribution powered by the cloud. For more information, visit www.otoy.com.

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