Octane X GPU Renderer Comes to Mac App Store
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.

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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