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!

Ray Tracey just posted this up on his blog. It’s a video of a high detail, Path Tracing, Global Illumination, 3D renderer. It’s running on Nvidia’s GTX 580 Fermi GPU, it starts on just one, and then goes up to 8 at about 5 minutes in. The result is extremely close to real time at very high sampling rates with incredibly complex 3D scenes.

What does this mean? Well, considering the GTX 600 series {or whatever Nvidia ends up calling their new Kepler GPU} is supposed to be twice as fast as the 500 series at ray tracing and similar expensive computational programs. It means we can expect 4-way SLI to get these results on the latest hardware next year. Beyond that? 2-way SLI in the following year. Then finally on a single discrete graphics card in 2014.

At that point, 2-way SLI, a very popular choice among enthusiasts, will likely hit the magical real-time 30 FPS target. That’s 3 years from now, and only if more significant improvements don’t occur in the time frame.

That said, the video itself provides some very beautiful indirectly lit scenes. Turn it up to 720p and marvel at it for a while, it’s truly amazing to think we’re so close to this technology being put into place in interactive ways.