Octane Render is a rendering engine that uses path tracing to provide high quality realistic results on an entirely GPU based solution. All you need to use it is a CUDA enabled Nvidia graphics card. You don’t need anything else actually, the CUDA card is the only real minimum requirement. There is a minimum CPU speed measured in a few hundred MHz, but the truth is that Windows 7, Vista, and XP need these bare minimum just to install.

The renderer itself however, that costs a fair chunk of change. Right now the price is 99 Euros which is 136.4616 US dollars. That’s not including an Nvidia Geforce 9000 series or higher graphics card to actually use this with. So ultimately most people will likely not be willing to front the cash needed just to play around with a really cool rendering environment.

So for everyone who isn’t rich, me included, you can look around this lovely gallery of rendered images they have assembled. A word of warning, it’s MASSIVE. However, I find the images they have placed there are extremely impressive. All of the images in the gallery were created in Octane Render using path tracing. Imagine these images moving around, and then you’ve got a good view of what the future is going to be for video games.

So, why post this?

Well, other than the fact it’s awesome… I realize that all the noise coated youtube videos and highly technical descriptions are… well… very dry. Often times they can be very hard to understand at all, but it’s hard to garner enthusiasm for something that is presented in a dry, stale, and almost purely technical form. So here’s a good representation of what a ray tracing algorithm actually produces that isn’t dry, soulless, stale, and horrifically overly technical.

Not that I view any of the things I post here are dry, soulless, stale, or horrifically overly technical… but I know other people feel quite a bit differently about this sort of thing. In any case, I’m rambling, and there’s a ton of pictures you could be looking at in that link instead of reading this. Well? What are you waiting for? Go look at those pictures!