The first public preview of the Octane X graphics rendering engine is now available for Mac users on macOS Catalina, with a wider release coming later in 2020.
Octane X is a new version of Otoy’s OctaneRender that has been completely rewritten in Apple’s Metal Graphics API as part of a “long and deep collaboration with Apple’s world-class engineering team.” It was originally released in the Apple WWDC 2019 keynote alongside Mac Pro.
Otoy announced on Monday that the public preview of Octane X was officially released for macOS Catalina 10.15.6. It is fully optimized for AMD Vega and Navi GPUs in Apple’s Mac Pro, iMac, iMac Pro and MacBook Pro lineups.
The company’s line of unbiased GPU-accelerated rendering platforms are widely used in movies, TV, gaming, motion graphics, and AR / VR applications. Although optimized for a range of Apple Macs, Octane X was designed with Mac Pro in mind. In 2019, Otoy CEO Jules Urbach said, “Octane X will take advantage of this unprecedented performance to take GPU production and interactive processing … to a whole new level.”
According to the company, Octane X features a fully rewritten mesh geometry engine and near-perfect linear scaling of rendering speed with multiple GPU configurations, including eGPUs connected via Thunderbolt 3. Delivered with RNDR, a platform for Distributed rendering that enables graphic artists to take advantage of decentralized GPU networks to power tasks. On a Mac Pro, it also supports up to 400 GPUs via network rendering and 56 Xeon CPU threads with up to 1.5TB of out-of-core memory.
Based on OctaneBench scores on a Mac Pro with a Radeon Pro Vega II Duo MPX module, Octane X also offers the fastest score for a single slot graphics card. The processor recorded a score of 415 on the machine, beating the previous maximum score of 401.
Octane X will come bundled with a dozen built-in plugins for various macOS 3D content creation platforms, including Autodesk Maya, Maxon Cinema 4D, and SideFX Houdini.
The public preview will be available on macOS Catalina starting Monday for current OctaneRender Studio and Enterprise subscribers. Otoy added that Octane X will also be available for free to all new users who activate Octane X on 2019 or later models of Mac Pro, iMac and MacBook Pro with macOS Big Sur.
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