Here you will find a list of commonly asked questions and answers. We recommend you consult this page prior to purchasing OctaneRender.
For more information or questions, please visit our Help Desk.
Here you will find a list of commonly asked questions and answers. We recommend you consult this page prior to purchasing OctaneRender.
For more information or questions, please visit our Help Desk.
OctaneRender requires the latest CUDA® 10 drivers and a CUDA-enabled NVIDIA® video card with support for compute capability 3.0 or higher . An up-to-date list can be found here. This includes Turing (e.g. RTX™ 20 Series, Titan RTX, GeForce RTX, and GTX 16 Series), Quadro® GPUs, Volta™ GPUs, GTX Titan (high-end), Pascal™ (GTX 10xx), Maxwell (GTX 7xx, GTX8xx, GTX9xx), and Kepler™ (GTX 680, GTX 690).
OctaneRender also requires a minimum of 8 GB RAM, and we recommend 16 GB or more.
Texture limits and differing power efficiency ratings also apply depending on the GPU microarchitecture. GPUs from the GeForce® line are usually clocked higher and render faster than the more expensive Quadro® and Tesla GPUs.
GeForce cards are fast and cost-effective, but have less VRAM than Quadro and Tesla cards. OctaneRender scales perfectly in a multi-GPU configuration and can use different types of NVIDIA cards at once — e.g., a GeForce RTX 2080Ti combined with a Quadro RTX 6000. The official list of NVIDIA CUDA-enabled products is located at https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus.
NOTE: Using multiple GPUs together combines the cores, resulting in a linear speedup, but VRAM is not compounded. All textures, HDRI, geometry, and other scene elements must fit into a functional memory – each render GPU must have the same copy of all of the scene elements to complete the process. Therefore, this function is limited by the card with the least amount of VRAM. If there’s not enough VRAM, then you can enable OctaneRender’s Out-Of-Core features.
As OctaneRender does not use the CPU for rendering, a fast multi-core CPU is not required, but it does significantly improve scene-loading speeds.
Compute capabilities required for octane features:
| Compute Capability | Limitations |
| 1.x | No longer supported as of version 1.20. |
| 2.0 and 2.1 | No longer supported as of version 4.0 |
| 3.0 and 3.5 | No limitations |
| 5.0 (eg: 750, 750ti) | Requires Octane Version 1.53 or higher |
| 6.0 and 6.1 (eg: Nvidia Titan X, 1080, 1070) | Requires Octane Version 3.03.2 or higher |
| 7.0 (eg: Nvidia Titan V) | Requires Octane Version 3.08 or higher |
| 7.5 (eg: Nvidia RTX) | Experimental Support Requires Octane Version 3.08 or higher |
Texture count limitations
| Compute Capability | Texture Count |
| lower than 3.0 | 64 LDR (8 bit) RGBA, 32 LDR (8 bit) greyscale, 4 HDR (16 bit) RGBA and 4 HDR (16 bit) greyscale |
| 3.0 or higher | 144 LDR (8 bit) RGBA, 68 LDR (8 bit) greyscale, 10 HDR (16 bit) RGBA and 10 HDR (16 bit) greyscale |
OctaneRender supports all major platforms:
For Windows and Linux, you need a recent NVIDIA driver found here.
For macOS, you need the CUDA runtime files found here.
Network Rendering was first introduced with OctaneRender 2. which comes with an OctaneRender slave that can run on computers with GPUs on your LAN. Octane has the ability to scan the LAN (or subnet) for slaves and use their GPU’s.
More information about network rendering can be found in the Standalone Manual here.
We recommend that you try our free demos to check compatibility and performance for your system.
You can also run our free OctaneBench tool to measure the performance of your system against the results submitted to OctaneBench.
Not yet. OctaneRender requires a CUDA-enabled NVIDIA video card to render. Work is ongoing to assimilate GPUs from AMD and Intel for future versions of OctaneRender. and allow these to be used with OctaneRender. In the meantime, if you have a machine with an internal AMD GPU, you may consider an eGPU solution with a Thunderbolt 3 controller to allow you to use the internal AMD GPU for system functions while the using the external CUDA GPU exclusively for rendering. (NOTE: OctaneRender doesn’t officially support eGPUs, and OTOY doesn’t provide support or troubleshooting for any eGPU issues.)
As OctaneRender completely relies on the GPU for rendering and does not use the CPU (besides scene loading), a more powerful graphics card (or multiple GPUs – see next question) is required to increase OctaneRender’s rendering performance. OctaneRender scales linearly with the number of CUDA cores within a given GPU architecture (e.g. the GTX 690 with 3072 CUDA cores is twice as fast in OctaneRender as the GTX 680 with 1536 CUDA cores). Adding more CPU cores improves scene-loading times.
Yes! OctaneRender completely relies on the GPU for rendering performance and scales extremely well. If your motherboard can accept more than one video card, adding additional video cards greatly improves OctaneRender’s rendering speed because OctaneRender’s performance scales perfectly with the number of GPUs (e.g. rendering with four GTX Titans will be 4x faster than using one GTX Titan), without the need for SLI. The cards can be different models, allowing you to use GPUs from two completely different architectures in a machine with multiple PCI-E slots (such as a GTX680 in the primary slot and a GTX1080 TI in the second).
The cost of adding an additional NVIDIA GPU to your system is very low compared to the cost of a small renderfarm of 10 to 15 computers to get the same performance with a CPU based rendering solution.
OctaneRender can use multiple video cards for rendering (see above). For the initial release of OctaneRender 4, as well as versions 3.08.x and below, we recommend disabling the SLI option in your NVIDIA control panel to maximize OctaneRender’s rendering performance.
Putting two cards (or multiple cards) together adds up the cores, resulting in a linear speedup. Unfortunately it is not same for the VRAM — memory is not compounded in the same manner in GPU rendering.
All the textures and HDRI among other stuff used for an entire scene has to fit into a functional swap space – that is each GPU must have a copy of all scene elements it needs to process — and therefore this swap space will be limited to the size of that card with the least amount of VRAM present in your machine or in the network where all GPUs used for GPU rendering resides.
e.g., If you combine a 6 GB Titan Black with a 4 GB 980 for rendering, the rendering speed increases, but the memory size available for the rendering is effectively 4 GB.
There are a few tricks you can use to save a bit of memory usage. Texture size depends on your project, and overly large textures may not be necessary when smaller texture maps already do the trick. If you place an emphasis on having large texture maps and very complex scenes, it’s safer to use a card with a large amount of VRAM and ensure that VRAM size is consistent throughout all the GPUs you intend to use for rendering.
To alleviate the card’s texture count limitation, you can also set OctaneRender to use the host memory (RAM) through its Out-Of-Core settings, allowing you to use more textures and geometry than would fit in the graphic memory of the video card (VRAM). Since Out-Of-Core memory is shared between GPUs, you can not turn devices on or off while using Out-Of-Core features.
However, OctaneRender 2018.1 and higher support NVIDIA NVLink, which allows sharing data between two GPUs via an NVLink Bridge, on supported RTX GPU configurations.
For a list of the full feature set, click here.
In OctaneRender, the current view of the scene is constantly rendering. As you adjust your objects’ materials or the camera parameters, you can see the changes immediately on the screen. You can also adjust the sun’s position in the sky and watch the reflections change as the sun moves across the sky. You can also change the position, scale, and rotation of individual objects in your scene in real-time. The interactivity in OctaneRender ends the cycle of adjusting parameters and waiting for the resulting render. With OctaneRender, you can work at the speed of your imagination.
Yes, OctaneRender is a true, unbiased ray tracer that runs completely on the GPU. OctaneRender doesn’t sacrifice accuracy in order to provide a 10x – 50x speed increase over traditional, CPU-based, unbiased ray tracers. It doesn’t use biased methods to approximate results. There are no tricks… it’s just really fast.
OctaneRender completely tasks the video card while rendering and previewing the current scene. This leaves a lot less video processing power for the operating system to draw windows and do screen refreshes. You can overcome this by either pausing the render to work with the operating system at full speed, or by adding a second video card (if the motherboard supports it) – using one video card dedicated to OctaneRender, and the other one used for display output.
Yes. OctaneRender supports offline licenses with a new offline dongle activation system that will allow you to activate your OctaneRender license offline. (Restrictions apply. See Purchase page for license compatibility.)
If you require offline mode, you can purchase USB dongles from our web store. You’ll select which Octane standalone license you wish to convert to an offline license to be used with the dongle. The conversion from a license to an offline license is permanent. Each offline Standalone license gets assigned to a USB dongle, and you can assign Octane plugin licenses, too. You can find additional information about the dongles in our documentation.
All materials are physically based in OctaneRender. The current types are glossy, diffuse, specular (glass), mix material, metallic, toon, and a universal layered material.
All environments that are typically used in unbiased renderers are also available in OctaneRender such as sun / sky, environment maps and area lights/IES lights.
You don’t have to be envious of package “X” anymore because they have a great render package only available to them. Users of most modern 3D modeling packages can enjoy the power of OctaneRender.
OctaneRender imports geometry and materials using the Wavefront “obj”, “abc” (alembic), “fbx”, or “vdb” formats, which most modeling software supports. Once the scene is set up in OctaneRender, you can re-import the geometry without the need to recreate all the materials.
To view the full list of supported plugins, visit our shop page here.
Just as it depends on which CPU you use, it depends on which GPU you use with OctaneRender. Speed increases of 10x to 50x can be expected over traditional CPU-based unbiased engines.
If you’re not using a plugin, the 3D modeling software exports scene, and OctaneRender Standalone imports that scene. Once the scene is in Standalone, you adjust the materials and lighting to your liking. The render resolution and rendering settings are lower at this point to provide maximum interactivity. Once the scene is ready for complete rendering, OctaneRender can increase the resolution and crank up the render engine settings. OctaneRender completes the final render in a matter of minutes, and not hours as is typical with CPU-based, unbiased renderers.
If you are using a plugin, all of the above is done seamlessly from within the host 3D modelling application. The integrated plugins are considered as add-ons to the Standalone Edition, providing a more familiar and convenient workflow.
Your Octane license runs on one machine at any time. Your OctaneRender software grabs its license from your Customer Account, and releases it when you close your OctaneRender application. This makes it easy to use your license between your different machines (for example, using OctaneRender on your PC, and then on your laptop).
To use OctaneRender on more than one machine at a time, you need to buy additional licenses for the other machines.
Please note: the licensing behavior described above applies to OctaneRender 3 and above. For users of OctaneRender 2, you must manually activate your license(s) by supplying the unique credentials of each license (see “Licenses” under your Customer Account).
Modelling applications with a native Network Rendering feature (e.g. Cinema4D NetRender) require you to have both an Octane Standalone and a compatible plugin license activated on each slave machine.
Alternatively, you can simply export your completed scene to the Standalone, and use native Octane Network Rendering from there. You will still need to purchase Standalone licenses for your slave machines.
For further information, see here.
The factors that will affect your rendering speed include:
While there may still be a slight speed difference between using a plugin as opposed to the Standalone Edition, you still get the tradeoff of a faster, more intuitive production workflow compared to rendering via the Standalone Edition.
For further information, see here.