The first public preview (PR1) for macOS Catalina 10.15.6 has been ‘completely rebuilt from the ground up’ using Apple’s Metal Graphics API, and optimised for performance on AMD Vega and Navi GPUs across the Mac Pro, iMac Pro, iMac and MacBook Pro product lines.
Octane X on Mac Pro features a completely rewritten mesh geometry engine optimised for AMD GPUs, supporting hundreds of millions of unique primitives per mesh instance, at high performance.
OTOY suggest that it offers ‘near perfect’ linear scaling of rendering speed with multiple GPU configurations, including eGPUs connected over Thunderbolt 3.
PR1 ships with full support for OTOY’s distributed GPU rendering platform RNDR, enabling users to scale their rendering jobs through decentralised GPUs. OTOY state that using RNDR server / Mac Pro as a render node allows users to “leverage 20Gb/s dual interconnect – the Mac Pro approaches InfiniBand interconnect speeds”.
“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,” said a spokesperson.
Octane X PR1 is available today for current OctaneRender Studio and Enterprise subscribers.
OTOY says that a full commercial version of Octane X, with one year of maintenance, will be made available in the coming months, and free to all new users activating Octane X on 2019 or later models of Mac Pro, iMac and MacBook Pro running MacOS Big Sur.
Introduced to the world during the keynote at Apple’s 2019 Worldwide Developer Conference, OTOY states that the latest launch marks a milestone in the company’s ongoing work and years of close collaboration with Apple’s graphics and engineering teams through Apple’s Metal API.
“Using Octane has been at the cornerstone of Swatchbook’s material visualisation for years. Moving to Octane X on MacOS Metal has been totally seamless,” said Swatchbook CEO Yazan Malkosh.
“For the first time, all our GPU rendering in Octane can be done on our MacBook Pros from anywhere in the world.”
Octane X features over a dozen integrated plug-ins for the most popular MacOS 3D content creation tools for, design, product visualisation and VFX – including Maxon Cinema 4D, SideFX Houdini and Autodesk Maya.
