Archive notice: This article was originally published on 28 July 2020. It has been translated into English and lightly edited for clarity while preserving its historical context.
Metal replaces CUDA on Mac
OTOY released the first public preview of Octane X. PR1 supported macOS Catalina and moved the renderer’s GPU backend from Nvidia CUDA to Apple’s Metal framework. Existing OctaneRender subscribers could download the preview, while a free standalone demo was offered separately.
Feature parity and plug-ins
PR1 included the feature set of OctaneRender 2020.1 and supported the available DCC plug-ins. Unreal Engine and Unity integration was expected with macOS 11. On Mac Pro systems, the build provided a mesh-geometry engine optimised for AMD GPUs and supported multiple GPUs, including eGPUs.
OTOY expected rendered output to match the CUDA edition, although OSL shaders could produce differences in the preview. That caveat matters for any pipeline depending on cross-platform image consistency.
Early benchmark figures
Published OctaneBench results listed the dual-GPU Radeon Pro Vega II Duo at 412 points and the single Vega II at 206. The Duo contains two GPUs on one board, so its score was not a like-for-like comparison with a single GPU.
Requirements and availability
The first public build required desktop macOS 10.15.6 and an AMD Vega or Navi GPU. iOS and Intel GPU support were not yet available. Existing users could obtain the software from their account downloads, and OTOY planned free access for owners of new Macs and Prime-tier users.
Studios should validate plug-in versions, OSL output, eGPU behaviour and benchmark relevance on representative scenes before moving production rendering to an early preview.
Sources
https://home.otoy.com/octane-x-pr1/
https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/demo/#demo
https://render.otoy.com/octanebench/results.php?v=&sort_by=&filter=&singleGPU=1
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=75411
