I think about buying octane render from refractive software. At your octane render users out there: Is Octane render worth the money considering Cycles or SmallLuxGPU (SLG)? Can i render with my GTX470 Super Overclocked from Gigabyte scenes with complicated light situations noise-free in a acceptable render time with Octane? In the Demo the pathtracing alogrithm seems to be not even faster then Cycles…
With best regards
CMOS
I asked myself the same question and my answer is no, my reasons:
also CUDA is designed to be simple but much less scalable and powerful than OpenCL, as i said before just think to the fact that you can run CUDA only on a VGA instead you can run OpenCL on every OpenCL-capable hardware and, for example, every iCore APU from Intel is capable to run OpenCL and some older C2D too, this simply means that if i have a pc that i want to use as small render-farm i can squeeze both the CPU and GPU with OpenCL, rather than with CUDA i have much less flexibilty.
OpenCL is an industry standard, CUDA is not.
I didn’t had any problems with nvidia drivers. And because i have a nvidia card it is no problem to stick with that ;). What is now faster? SLG, Cycles or Octane? Please answer my questions in the first post.
What is now faster? SLG, Cycles or Octane? Please answer my questions in the first post
You really should be trying these out for yourself, there is nothing in the world stopping you from doing so. Nobody except you know what type of scenes you’ll be rendering. Which you may really like using, or one you may really hate using. Just go and do it rather then relying on other people to make up your mind for you.
I agree with trying it out. I use Vray but that’s because I also use it with Maya since a few years back. But I think Cycles is slowly coming to the point where no external renderers are actually needed. 
About CUDA vs OpenCL. It’s a question of what works. After 20 years in graphics using OS X, Linux & Windows - and also a couple of years away from graphics, designing workstations & selling hardware - there is one thing that is absolutely clear to me; Use Intel CPU’s & Nvidia cards. There’s just nothing in professional graphics that works better with ATI/AMD and there probably never will be. This is not a political statement or someone prefering Iphone over Android-kinda thing, this is just experience talking, a question of what works & what’s reliable in a profesional workflow… And you can Google the absolute sh*t out of this belief and you will find that 99% of professionals working with graphics feel the same way. 
I’m shocked … this is your consideration? Luxrender is just more advanced using OpenCL because you can use both your CPU and GPU.
what is your, technically speaking, point of view?
what is the point with Octane? investing in something that can use, in the best case scenario, only an half of your pc, and can break with the wrong software updates?
if you want to buy something just buy it, if you want to plan an investment you have to consider the entire scenario and speaks technically.
yeah, ATI is bad, just approximately every console out there has an ATI chip and the PowerVR for mobile are also derived from ATi chip, yeah AMD/ATI is totally bad.
ATI owns its foundries and produces better GPU with less power consumption and Nvidia can only ask to TSMC to do something, but ATI is worst.
totally.
anyway we are talking about computation here, CUDA is not about gfx, maybe in 20 years you have never discovered the difference between a CPU and a GPU.
are you done writing random stuff around here?
Blé
It really doesn’t matter if you use OpenCL or CUDA, what is open, locked, ‘standard’, what is important is what works on a daily basis for professional production workflows. CUDA not being a standard is not true as it’s the biggest GPU computing standard there is, though not an ‘open industry standard’, but that’s just semantics. OpenCL will probably overcome CUDA in the future, but as of today it doesn’t… 
CMOS,
As Octane, like Cycles, is an un-biased renderer, no I don’t believe it’s worth the money - if you don’t work professionally and can spend those €99 without blinking. If you can spend the €99 I’m still not convinced an un-biased renderer is the way to go… So if you’re not in a panic, I’d hold off and see how Cycles develops - I bet it does & really fast too…
Blé
I never said ATI/AMD was bad, I say Nvidia is a more stabile product for production use. For me that’s the only thing that is important. I have no agenda, I’m not sponsored by Nvidia, I don’t prefer closed code or standards to open code or standards, I’m only concerned with what gives me the least problems in production - and in my experience and the people I take help of in building my hardware, that is Intel CPU’s on Intel chipset motherboards and Nvidia graphic cards.
Oh, hehe, and I just remembered my sons gaming computer use an Athlon CPU and an ATI card …
My Octane render crashes while importing an .obj file. That is no sign for a good stability :(.
OpenCL > all your hardware, low level programming interface
CUDA > only VGA, shader based
it’s clearer this way? did you ever read the OpenCL specifications? something technically about OpenCL? You just say that CUDA is superior compared to OpenCL, ok, in what cases?
what means “productive” to you?
Using everything no matter how is worse?
Cuda is faster just because the typical approach is
OpenCL = VGA
CUDA = VGA
and not
OpenCL = every OpenCL capable device
CUDA = VGA
try every OpenCL application out there with as much thread as your hardware can handle with a GNU/linux distribution and we will see which is the fastest technology.
anyway i’m still waiting for the reasons why AMD ATI are just worst than Nvidia in the 3D industry considering your previous post.
your posts are so full of random things, just considering what you say the Xbox 360, the Wii and PS3 are a totally failure and Nvidia is leading the way with new technologies, when all the recent products from Nvidia, both software and hardware, are a recycle of the previous ones.
CMOS, try with the demo files > http://www.refractivesoftware.com/downloads/OctaneRender_1024_beta246_DemoSuite.zip
It is a manual in your demo, look there for exporter settings for blender. IIRC switch of “Include Edges” during export.
Octane renderer is more matured as cycles, SSS, refraction, absorption, real sun system, portals, ies, blackbody lights and so forth.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHP0E65vap4&feature=player_embedded
Cheers, mib.
Blé
I don’t get why you get this upset. It’s a question about what is stabile and AMD drivers are not, not in Windows and for professional work. Maya, 3DS Max, Houdini, Adobe CS, all these applications are less stabile using AMD (on Windows). And the reason for Nvidia being more stabile than AMD cards is the driver. These applications do work marginally better in OS X with AMD, but the OS X driver is way better than the Windows driver, no question about that.
About gaming consoles, I have no idea what consoles use what hardware, I don’t game. I also don’t know why that would be relevant in a discussion about the stability in graphic production enviroments.
blé, Farmfield, please stay on topic. This is ungracious to the thread starter.
Cheers, mib.
You are very correct. Sorry. And it’s not only off topic, as the threadstarter has a Nvidia card it’s a very irrelevant discussion, hehe… 
So I conclude by repeating that; No, with Cycles being an un-biased renderer, it’s probably not worth the €99 to buy another un-biased renderer. And also, as stated above, there’s a trial so why not test it and you can decide for yourself if the difference might be worth it. 
Thank you mib2berlin. I am testing now and it seems that octane is not much faster at pathtracing mode. Its very similiar to SLG. But the direct lightning method is nice. It renders fast and it get’s good results. The daylight is also a very nice feature. I don’t know. Should i buy it or not? The 99€ wouldn’t hurt me but i don’t want to buy something if it is useless.
I buy it only for playing with 1 year ago, never regrets. You have updates included til 1.99 and they have not reach 1.0.
2.57 is a bit confusing. Some of the best CG artists use octane, like jan kudelasek, enioceric/a and many more.
Many user use it for daily work, most archviz.
It is worth the money.
Cheers, mib.
Thank you for your answer. Are you using the direct lightning algorithm or the pathtracing / pcm algorithm? Pathtracing is as fast as SLG or maybe slower. But direct lightning doesn’t give me any global illumination or caustics (i tried caustics on pathtracing but i didn’t get any good results. How are caustics working in Octane?). And the big problem is still PayPal. I heard some bad things about it (debit money form your bank account). I have already written a support mail to the support but they only told me that paypal is the only way to buy :(.
Never have problems with paypal, you can send the money to paypal and if it arrived on your papal account, you can buy (2-3 Days).
I have gave them “Einzugsermächtigung”, I buy they debit. I do nothing they do nothing.
Caustics is a heavy thing for pathracers and I can´t use PMC with my GTX 260 (to old).
Here is an example with pathtracing, one meshlight and HDR environment.
You have to reduce maxdepth to the minimum, here it is 4.
Rendertime = 7 minutes.
Should be faster with PMC/MLT kernel.
Cheers, mib.
