Q: Looking a bit into the past and comparing the increase of performance by CPUs and GPUs we could say that the performance by GPUs is increasing faster than by CPUs. Was this one of the reasons why to develop a GPU based renderer?
Absolutely. We have closely followed the research being done with GPU ray tracing for a while. Around Siggraph 2009, it became clear that the GPU would become the best platform to develop a renderer on. The massive number of cores on today's GPU combined with the “embarrassingly parallel” and fine-grained nature of the ray tracing algorithms used by Octane Render result in a 10 to 20x speedup when using the GPU compared to the CPU, and we think we can make the gap even bigger soon.
Q: What is the main factor by the GPU and rendering with Octane Render? Can the memory of the GPU increase the performance or the main factor are the CUDA cores?
The amount of memory on the graphics card has no impact on the rendering performance, it just allows to render larger scenes with more and larger textures. The specific GPU architecture, number of cores and GPUs and core clock are the main performance determining factors.
Q: The current GPUs have different architecture starting from Tesla, Kepler or Fermi. Are all compatible with Octane Render? Could you tell our user some difference between them?
Yes, Octane Render is compatible with all the CUDA capable architectures, starting from the Tesla architecture (e.g. GTX 8xxx, GTX 9xxx, GTX 2xx) to Fermi (e.g. GTX 4xx and 5xx) and Kepler (GTX 6xx). Octane Render is also compatible with GeForce, Quadro and Tesla cards. The Fermi cards are incredibly powerful compared to the previous generation, but also consumed a lot of power. The Kepler cards generally have more memory, consume less power and allow for much more textures to be used with Octane Render than Fermi.
Q: What could be the ideal workstation for Octane Render? It’s better to use the Quadro line or Geforce line from Nvidia?
We currently recommend our users to have a dedicated low end GPU for the GUI and OS (this can even be Intel integrated graphics) and one or more GeForce GTX 680 or GTX 690 GPUs for rendering. The GTX 680 has up to 4 GB RAM, it runs efficiently and silently and Octane renders very fast on this card. The GTX 690 is twice as fast as the GTX 680 in Octane and using multiple GPUs (if your budget allows it) will significantly enhance the rendering experience. We haven't seen any benefit from using Quadro compared to GeForce besides having more video memory.
Q: Octane Render can access a user build material library, do you also contribute to the library or its only user based?
Yes, we have artists in our team that upload materials (for example, we recently made a very complex and realistic skin shader that uses subsurface scattering) to the online material library so other users can apply it immediately to their models.
Q: Are you proud on any particularly moment when Octane Render was used?
It may sound a bit cheesy, but we are often proud when we see an extraordinary render or animation. If I would have to pick one that I am particularly impressed with, I would say an architectural visualization made by WakYak