To use the coming Octane extension in Unity (might arrive around 2017), it seems that we need to use Nvidia GPUs. I am going to buy a graphics card soon and this parameter helped me narrow my choices.
All games will probably move to some form of GPU tracing at some point, better sooner than later. Key interesting point here is that it’s chicken and egg.
When Carmack made games, GPUs sold better if they ran his games faster. That drove the whole market.
Imagine when a flood of indie games hit steam with experimental path tracing option? Going to be a lot of demand for faster path tracing.
The concern with nVidia GPUs is valid - it can’t ever be more than a literal otoy OR viz/prerender system while that remains because it excludes too much of the market including consoles… however:
The question of the hour is: can we use this in actual games, or is it planned to just be for offline rendering?
2 Likes
It would be nice to see for actual in-game…
The only things I heard him mention though was Images and 360 Video or whatever.
Didn’t hear him say anything about actual in game… Unity would definitely be the most beast engine graphically in an instant if that happened, no and’s if’s or buts to compare lol.
Yep I don’t see them being brave enough yet to supply it for actual games… 
or are they.
2 Likes
Thanks for the feedback 
“Broad cross-platform support: Using OTOY’s CUDA cross-compiler, OctaneEngine and OctaneImager is expected to support all possible CPU and GPU devices and platforms, including support for Mac platforms, and AMD GPUs.”
Key phrase : is expected.
“Imagine when a flood of indie games hit steam with experimental path tracing option”
Most probably it will take some years.
“can we use this in actual games, or is it planned to just be for offline rendering?”
Perhaps Dragon’s Lair - like interactive apps, in 360, which is cool and unexploited - yet.
I think a second hand 970 - around 180 euro - has a nice cost / performance ratio now, 1060 3gb is around 230 euro and 1070 is around 480. No desktop VR for another year or two for me.
At the very least it could be used for lightmap baking.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/5au9gc/otoys_jules_urbach_on_octanerender_unity/d9jvr9v/
I am looking forward to this.
The thing is that I just got a new amd card …
According to this: Otoy claims to have Nvidia's CUDA running on AMD GPUs | bit-tech.net
Otoy is claiming to have octane working with amd cards by reverse engineering the cuda code.
If nvidia will allow this is another thing though.
Yeah I got an AMD as well… I really hope they allow it, will definitely help.
I…I…I… can’t wait, i need it now.
I think it would be useful to use it to bake to defuse as an option and to bake lightmaps. however the new lightmap tech might be able to do a better jobof baking lightmaps.
What happened to ARM’s PowerVR ray-tracing chip, it looked like that was on the cards at one point?
this site is good for comparing features,
http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-970-vs-GeForce-GTX-1060
At Unite the presentation was exclusively focused on offline usage.
One thing to note though is that Otoy also owns the Brigade, which is specifically for real-time applications… I wouldn’t be surprised if they plan on porting that tech to Unity eventually (I really hope they do!).
1 Like
I honestly can not wait until this happens. I am so excited!
This article has me chomping at the bit!
http://uploadvr.com/otoy-building-one-vrs-important-technologies/
As a pro subscriber, is there any way I can get in early as a tester?
Well if it’s just for prerenders or cube maps then I’m really not interested. I’m only interested in it for actual game rendering - I’d support that early, even if framerate sucks.
1 Like
I agree as well.
Being Steam doesn’t take non-ingame Screen Shots anymore, makes this almost useless outside of movies if it’s only pre-renders.
I’d rather deal with 20 FPS frames than taking snap shots that I can’t even use on Steam haha.
For me it’s about the fact that if we build it, gpu manufacturers will meet the demand of gamers playing it.
If there wasn’t any accelerated Quake, we’d probably just be mid-DX9 era today, things only move as quickly as the forces acting on them.
1 Like
“Soon Light field renders in texture baking and eventually brigade + PowerVR for real time path tracing in Unity games, but the latter is a few steps out. Also octane GPU baking system can power progressive texture baking inside unity. Didn’t have time to show that during keynote.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/5au9gc/otoys_jules_urbach_on_octanerender_unity/d9jvr9v/
We’re not far off things like brigade / Octane now TBH… Having worked with VXGI and SVOGI variants, like the screenie below looks pretty realistic to me (VXGI):
The issue being VXGI isn’t actually that well optimised compared to other SVOGI / SVOTI solutions, plus of course it runs better with Nvidia HW… It would of been awesome if AMD could of made a well optimised equivalent that’s multi-GPU…
If nothing else you can have SVOGI and 60FPS even with outdoor scenes that stretch a fair distance on what’s classed as mid range GPU’s today, just look at CE.
1 Like