Octane X GPU Renderer Comes to Mac App Store

Tuesday March 9, 2021 10:07 am PST by Juli Clover

OTOY today announced that the Octane X GPU renderer is now available for free from the Mac App Store, bringing native Octane X Enterprise features to creative professionals running macOS Big Sur for the first time.

octane x mac app store
The software was built specifically for Apple's Macs, taking advantage of the Metal API and offering support for M1 Macs. Octane X has been in development for several years and it offers full pixel parity with OctaneRender.

Octane X is the world's first and fastest unbiased, spectrally-correct GPU production renderer for macOS, built from the ground up for maximum performance on Apple Metal and Apple Silicon, and empowering artist workflows across visual effects, motion graphics, gaming, design, concept art and architectural visualization.

Octane X is optimized for maximum rendering performance on AMD Polaris, Vega and Navi GPUs as well as Intel SkyLake GPUs on macOS Big Sur 11.1 and later.

This exclusive version of Octane X for the App Store features multi-GPU rendering, network rendering (through an additional Octane Enterprise Render Node license) and Apple M1 native GPU rendering support.

macOS Metal features include a rewritten mesh geometry optimized for AMD GPUs and near-perfect linear scaling of rendering speed with multiple GPU configurations.

Alongside the new app, OTOY is offering new Octane X Prime and Enterprise subscriptions, which are free for one year with access to the Octane X plug-in integrations across content creation tools like Cinema4D, SketchUp, Maya, Houdini, Blender, Modo, Nuke, Unreal Engine and Unity.

MacBook Pro, iMac Pro, and Mac Pro users have access to a year of Octane X Enterprise with RNDR, while other Macs have a year of access to Octane X Prime and Octane X DCC integrations.

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Top Rated Comments

DrV

72 months ago

Lol yeah people don’t realize how far ahead Nvidia and AMD are when it comes to graphics. Like wildly ahead.

Well, it must depend on what and how you compare.

Comparing GPUs is difficult, as different architectures have different strengths and weaknesses. But a few generally rather acceptable data points:
[LIST=1]
* Apple M1 GPU is generally a bit faster than ancient GTX 1050 Ti.
* RTX 3090 is approximately seven times as fast as GTX 1050 Ti.
* M1 GPU maximum power consumption is approximately 10 W.
* RTX 3090 maximum power consumption is approximately 350 W.

Now, it is evident that RTX 3090 is much faster than M1 GPU. But if you look at the numbers, M1 is much more power-efficient. RTX 3090 offers 7-fold performance with 35-fold power consumption. From the technological point of view, I would call Apple's chip more advanced while Nvidia is just using more power and using more parallelism.

So, I would not say Nvidia or AMD are wildly ahead. They have been concentrating on raw processing power whereas Apple has concentrated on making a very power-efficient GPU.

Score: 9 Votes (Like | Disagree)

Analog Kid

72 months ago

Constitution class refit, IMO, the best looking Enterprise of them all. Enterprise refit = Enterprise-A > Enterprise-E (Soveriegn) > Enterprise-D (Galaxy)> Enterprise-B (Excelsior) > Enterprise (Constitution) > Enterprise-C (Ambassador) > Enterprise (NX).

I think I just learned more about you than I did about starships... 😉

Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)