OctaneRender 2026.2 Released
This version includes improvements and fixes, with a particular focus on features introduced earlier.
OctaneRender 2026.2, the latest version of OTOY's GPU renderer, is now available, introducing a range of improvements and fixes, with a particular focus on enhancing recently added features.
Among the highlights is support for meshlets and high-quality texture displacement, increasing the maximum displacement map resolution to 16K, in network rendering. For those unfamiliar, the meshlets system enables streaming of massive scene geometry assets adaptively from disk, similar to Unreal Engine's Nanite, but designed for path tracing workflows:
Here's the full list of improvements in OctaneRender 2026.2:
- Directional lights can now be excluded with the light IDs setting in the kernel node;
- Texture nodes with a Linear sRGB + legacy gamma color space option now have a Linear sRGB color space option too, to make the regular linear sRGB case simpler. This ignores legacy gamma, so you don't have to ensure it is set to 1.0;
- Added release flag optixDisableParallelBuild, which forces serialized OptiX pipeline builds (slower but more robust with some NVIDIA drivers, including some early R591 versions). Use this if experiencing random application crashes during scene compilations if you cannot upgrade to a more recent (or older) driver;
- MaterialX nodes now all have descriptions visible in the Lua API browser;
- Neural Radiance Cache data usage is now displayed in the Preferences window under Device memory usage;
- Added Neural Radiance Cache capability to the photon tracing kernel;
- Significantly improved performance of high-quality texture displacement;
- Show the progress reported via octane.gui.updateStatus() when a script is being run using the scripting component;
- Added metalness AOV for layered materials that have a metalness input.
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