Otoy OctaneRender® is a popular unbiased render engine that uses graphics cards to achieve extremely fast renders. Compatible with many industry-leading 3D design software applications OctaneRender® can produce realistic images by calculating every ray of light in a scene. To accomplish these high-speed renders, you will need an optimised Workstation for OctaneRender® to handle this demanding workflow.
Slow renders can affect your productivity, deadlines and profits. We understand Otoy OctaneRender® users’ needs and offer customised Workstation solutions for this fantastic render engine.
This article will show you how to configure your ideal Otoy OctaneRender® Workstation.
Best Graphics Configuration for Otoy OctaneRender®?
The graphics card (GPU) is the most important component for an OctaneRender® Workstation. This GPU render engine uses one or more graphics cards instead of CPUs to compute your renders. GPUs have more cores than CPUs, which makes them far faster for rendering tasks.
OctaneRender® can utilise all the GPU power available, so higher-end cards and multiple cards will give you faster renders. You can also combine several mid-range cards to get more performance than a single high-end card. Our expert consultancy team can help you choose the best GPU configuration for your budget.
We suggest using blower-style Professional NVIDIA (formerly Quadro) or NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards for multi-GPU setups. These cards have a cooling system that ejects the heat out of the case, unlike top-down cooling cards that trap the heat inside. Blower-style cards are ideal for stacking together and keeping your system cool.
NVIDIA GeForce vs NVIDIA Quadro Vs AMD Radeon Graphics
Otoy OctaneRender® only works with NVIDIA CUDA graphics cards, so AMD cards are, unfortunately, not an option.
We suggest using NVIDIA GeForce RTX cards for OctaneRender® because they give you the best performance for your money. These cards are very popular and effective for GPU rendering. However, if you need Professional NVIDIA cards for other applications or the higher VRAM they provide, they also work well with OctaneRender®.
You should also choose an NVIDIA RTX card. These cards have dedicated Ray Tracing (RT) cores that can dramatically speed up ray tracing rendering.
Which CPU should I use for OctaneRender®?
Your CPU does not directly affect your rendering speed in OctaneRender®, but it does affect redner loading times and the number of GPUs your Workstation supports. A faster CPU can load scenes faster, and a CPU with more PCIe lanes can support more graphics cards.
You ideally want 16x PCIe lanes per graphics card to avoid performance loss. You can use an Intel® Core™ or AMD Ryzen™ based system if you only want one graphics card. These processors are very affordable and offer fantastic clock speeds.
We suggest an Intel® Xeon® W or AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ Pro Workstation for OctaneRender® for a multi-GPU configuration. These Workstations are far more powerful and support up to 3 or 4 GPUs.
How Much Memory Do You Need?
The required amount of system memory can vary depending on your scene’s complexity.
We suggest to our customers that 32GB is enough for most scenes.
Some users rendering exceptionally large scenes or that use other memory-intensive applications may benefit by upgrading to 64GB.
Which Storage Configuration is Best For Otoy OctaneRender®?
Your storage options for Workstations are NVMe Solid State Drives (SSD), SATA SSD and HDD. NVMe is the fastest and slightly more expensive option than SATA SSDs.
We suggest using NVMe for your Operating System and applications if you can afford it. If not, use a SATA SSD, which is still much faster than HDD.
We also suggest using an HDD or Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems for backups / long-term storage of your project files. Traditional HDD storage is very slow compared to SSD, but they have large capacities and are very cost-effective.
Network GPU Rendering With Otoy OctaneRender®?
Network Rendering lets you use GPUs from other workstations or servers on your network to speed up your renders. OctaneRender® allows you to use this to increase your rendering potential dramatically. You need a standalone license for each slave machine that matches your local master workstation version.
Network Rendering in OctaneRender® is currently limited to 200x external GPUs, and you must have at least one compatible GPU in your local machine. Please contact our expert consultancy team to learn more about our multi-GPU network rendering server options.
