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OctaneRender-Feature

One of the major differences between AMD and Nvidia is their share of the professional graphics market place. Nvidia dominates this space and its profit margins, and while AMD has had some high contour wins with Apple, it hasn't cut deeply into Nvidia's marketplace share. Role of the reason Nvidia has a lock on both workstation and high performance computing is CUDA, its programming language for GPU compute. Now one company, Otoy, is challenge to have broken that lock.

Otoy is the owner and developer of Octane Render, a real-time unbiased rendering engine that supports 3D rendering software suites similar 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema4D, and Lightwave. It's too available as its own standalone software suite. It was the first unbiased rendering suite to support GPU-only rendering and a high-profile early win for Nvidia's CUDA — which is office of why information technology's surprising to encounter the visitor branching out to support other architectures in this mode.

Didn't AMD but announce this?

In that location'southward some timing oddities hither that I'm not sure how to explain. Terminal year, AMD announced its Boltzman Initiative. Part of that initiative is a software layer that allows AMD GPUs to execute CUDA code through the use of a compatibility layer.

Open-Source-Compute1

AMD's Boltzmann Initiative

Here's how VentureBeat describes Otoy's new compatibility layer: "In a nutshell, Otoy reverse-engineered Nvidia's general purpose graphics processing unit of measurement (GPGPU) software, known as CUDA, to run on non-Nvidia hardware. That means that programs written in the CUDA language are no longer exclusive to Nvidia graphics chips."

According to Otoy'southward CEO, Jules Urbach, the point of developing this CUDA translation layer is so that the company'south high-end Octane Return software can run as easily on AMD GPUs as their Intel counterparts. "We take been able to do this without changing a line of CUDA code, and it runs on AMD chips," Urbach said. "Y'all can now program once and accept CUDA everywhere. AMD has never actually been able to provide an culling."

Octane Render

Octane Return in action. Prototype from FXGuide

AMD's Boltzmann Initiative would seem to provide the culling that Urbach is referencing, and it appears to accomplish the aforementioned goal. Information technology'southward not articulate how the ii programs differ from each other, though Otoy does mention wanting to run software on a wider variety of platforms, operating systems, and technologies. AMD'due south Boltzmann Initiative, of course, is designed solely for AMD'southward own GPUs.

Every bit for performance, Urbach states that "It runs on the other cards at the same speed as it runs on Nvidia cards." Merely again, that's something AMD has implied about its own Boltzmann Initiative — when we asked the visitor how AMD GPUs compared to NV cards running CUDA, the RTG sectionalisation unsaid that unless the CUDA code had been manus-optimized for a specific CUDA architecture, it should run equally rapidly on AMD hardware as on an Nvidia counterpart GPU.

Urbach claims that the long-term goal is to allow CUDA to target Vulkan, DirectX, and OpenGL (along with Android, PS4, and WebGL 3), and that Otoy wants to exist able to run CUDA applications on platforms similar iOS, where Apple's Metal is the dominant low-overhead API.

Supposedly Otoy is working on turning Octane Render into a plugin that the UE4 engine can utilize, simply Octane Render isn't used for real-time rendering. Adapting a version of it to piece of work inside a game engine would be extremely challenging. It's not at all clear why Otoy would desire to interpret native CUDA into many of the APIs that Urbach lists — no games that I'chiliad aware of leverage OpenCL or CUDA for any kind of tasks, and neither AMD nor Nvidia have talked about using either linguistic communication for this purpose.

Nosotros've reached out to Octane Render and volition update this story if nosotros hear more details. At the very least, it looks similar AMD's push button to catechumen CUDA code into something that can run on more GPUs has caught the attention and imagination of other vendors.