OctaneRender 2019 Will Support Vulkan On PC & Metal On macOS

We posted an initial look at OctaneRender 2019’s RTX performance last week, and based on the reaction so far, it seems like people are excited about what’s coming. In that post, we mentioned that 2019 would introduce AMD Radeon support through Vulkan, something that led to some questions around the web, and further investigation by us. We reached out to OTOY to double-check the facts, and heard back from company co-founder and CEO Jules Urbach who helped set the record straight on some things.

OctaneRender in Unreal Engine

For most of its life, OctaneRender has exclusively supported NVIDIA’s CUDA libraries, which means it’s only supported NVIDIA’s GPUs. Octane 3 shook things up with the introduction of OpenCL support, allowing the engine to run on Radeon. Though initial performance was a bit lacking at first, improvements ended up being made, all the way until the point where Apple decided to kill off OpenCL support in macOS.

Since that time, Apple fans have been curious about Octane becoming available for Metal. Fortunately, OTOY does have that planned, though like some other features, full support is going to take time to roll out. Support for headless rendering on PC, Linux, macOS, and iOS will ship with 2019.2, a release that will also bring support for accelerated ray tracing through Vulkan-RT on Linux and Windows. Versions 2019 and 2019.1 will need to get here first (the old numbered scheme is gone).

At last August’s SIGGRAPH, Jules gave a presentation (that I regret missing) on what’s coming, and at the 36 minute mark of the linked video, he highlights the architecture support that’s coming. It’s not only Vulkan and Metal-supported rendering that’s expected, but even D3D and CPU. Given how much OTOY likes to eke as much performance out of a given system, we look forward to a future where Octane can render using both the CPU and GPU. In the same video, a demo is shown of Octane running on an iPhone 8, with note that it’d run even faster on an iPad Pro thanks to its faster GPU.

You can test RTX support in OctaneRender 2019 with the beta benchmark

To make life easier on itself, OTOY’s developed an SDK which allows it to write code once in GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language), and target all required platforms and APIs with the respective supported features and optimizations. All of these cross-platform efforts benefit OTOY’s upcoming RNDR service, which uses Ethereum blockchain technology to crowd-source GPU horsepower, as well as act as a ledger and a place to store assets. RNDR, which is currently in a closed beta, will allow anyone to run software on their computer, and with a supported GPU, provide their resources to the world at large. Those who contribute their hardware’s efforts will earn tokens, which could then be used for personal RNDR jobs, or for use with other services that might come about (eg: decentralized store).

For Apple users wondering what to do about their Octane work in the near-future, the current situation is a little frustrating. Since Apple removed support for CUDA in macOS 10.14, those using CUDA have had to avoid upgrading. Those who do upgrade to 10.14 will be forced to use CUDA devices over their network. In the future Octane release which supports Metal, macOS users will have their normal solution back.

For what it’s worth, running a native Windows version of Octane through Boot Camp would expose the hardware the same as an actual Windows PC, so when the time comes, you could go that route in order to use the Vulkan API, but that’s of course a massive pain if you don’t actually want to run Windows. The current president of RED, Jarred Land, has complained in recent months to Apple about its total lack of NVIDIA support, but it doesn’t seem like the pleas will have much effect. This is also despite NVIDIA itself promising “great” drivers as soon as the OK is given. Bah.