Render engine Octane to make Cuda available on non-Nvidia hardware

Otoy, a company that focuses on performing heavy graphic calculations in the ‘cloud’, says it has understood Nvidia’s gpgpu software Cuda in such a way that the software written for Cuda can also run on a chip architecture other than Nvidia’s.

That says Otoy’s director Jules Urbach in an interview with GamesBeat. At the moment, Otoy has ported the Cuda language so that it can run on AMD, Intel and ARM GPUs, allowing Cuda software to run on all those chipsets without modification.

According to Urbach, the Cuda language is much richer than the open general purpose GPU software OpenCL. Therefore, according to him, OpenCL has still not proved to be a good alternative to Cuda. He therefore considered making a cross compiler an ‘important task’. In nine weeks, the Otoy Cuda development team managed to reverse engineer.

Urbach thinks it will save developers a lot of time because it will allow them to write code for Cuda that can run on a variety of hardware, including PCs, Macs, iOS and Android devices. “We managed this without changing a line of Cuda code and it works on AMD chips. You can now program once and use Cuda everywhere. AMD has never been able to provide such an alternative,” says Urbach.

Among other things, Otoy is the maker of the Octane Render engine, which it acquired in 2012 from New Zealand-based Refractive Software. The disadvantage of the software is that it only runs on Nvidia GPUs. That problem should be fixed with the 3.1 release of the software. Urbachs thinks the version will be available this summer. The Cuda code would run just as fast on other graphics cards as Nvidia’s.

The goal is to enable Cuda to address other APIs such as Vulkan, DirectX, and OpenGL. The main purpose of targeting other APIs is to be able to use Apple’s Metal gpgpu API on OS X and iOS, which would also be the primary reason for the translation, which is to make the company’s proprietary data available on Cuda. to run based software on Macs and iOS devices. Otoy also modifies Octane to function as a plug-in in game engines such as the Unreal engine.

Octane can be used via plugins from various 3d programs, such as 3ds Max, SketchUp and Blender.