The main changes in Octane Render 2025.1 include support for rest attributes to reduce texture distortion when projecting textures onto animated meshes that lack existing UV effects. When rest attributes are enabled, OctaneRender uses the rest vertex positions and normals to calculate the UV coordinates. The update also introduces a built-in decal system, which allows textures to be projected onto the mesh geometry in the scene, such as adding patterns to surfaces or effects like dirt and damage.

Other new features in Octane Render 2025.1 include the Vectron Displacement node. This node allows users to use texture maps for displacing Vectron primitives and volumes created with the Volume SDF node. It operates "in real-time, at any scale" and is compatible with "complex SDF trees" or the mesh volume node.

Other new features in Octane Render 2025.1 include the camera node with a realistic lens, which simulates the optical properties of real camera lenses. This version emulates 16 different lens types, including those from Canon, Cooke Optics, Minolta, Nikon, and Zeiss. The new node replicates real-world lens effects, including bokeh, vignetting, chromatic aberration, and barrel distortion.

As for rendering, the new Octane server node allows rendering a different scene on a remote instance and using the result as an AOV or texture in the current scene. This is an "experimental" feature that currently works in the standalone version of the software and only on Windows. The remote instance can either be another instance of the standalone OctaneRender version or a separate Octane server application. Additionally, Render Network, Otoy's distributed GPU-based online rendering service, is now directly available in OctaneRender. Users can upload scenes and track the progress of rendering tasks directly from the software.
This release also includes updates to existing features, such as the Chaos texture node, which randomly distributes textures across surfaces. Users can now apply texture maps or procedural noise to distort the scattering pattern and use different types of texture projections other than UV maps. There are also 11 new blending modes for AOV layer output, including Hue, Saturation, Color, Brightness, Hard Mix, Linear Light, Soft Light, and Spot Light.

Mac users also benefit from improved performance in Octane X, the software version optimized for the Metal platform. This update enhances hardware acceleration on modern Apple M3 and M4 chips, adding support for primitives other than triangles, including hair, particles, and analytic light. A test scene shown in the release notes on the Otoy forum demonstrates a 1.5x speed increase in rendering compared to OctaneRender 2024.1 on the high-end M4 Pro chip, although Otoy notes that less complex scenes show a smaller performance boost.
Most of the key features in OctaneRender 2025.1 were initially planned for OctaneRender 2024.2, which now seems to have transformed into the current release. The only feature announced for 2024.2 that is not included is the neural filter system, which was designed to “use neural filters from Stability AI and other vendors directly within the scene.” This has now been moved to a separate experimental build, OctaneRender 2026.1, along with other previously announced (and sometimes heavily delayed) features, including network streaming, built-in MaterialX support, and rendering of 3D Gaussian splats.
As for the alpha version of OctaneRender 2026.1, it includes several key features previously reported by Otoy. These include built-in support for MaterialX—a growing open material standard used in VFX workflows and already supported by other renderers like Arnold, Houdini Karma, RenderMan, Unreal Engine, and V-Ray. It also supports 3D Gaussian splat rendering, a new 3D scene reconstruction technology used in both VFX and architectural visualization and already supported in V-Ray. Both of these features were initially planned for the OctaneRender 2024 release. Other features in the current alpha version include real-time shader offsetting, a new Neural Radiance caching system, and support for tracing sets.

Features that were not included in the initial alpha release of OctaneRender 2026.1 but are planned for future updates include the meshlet geometry streaming system with significant delays. Described as “similar to Nanite from Unreal Engine but for trajectory tracing,” this feature was initially announced for the Octane 2023 release cycle and then re-announced for 2024. Other features scheduled for future updates include neural rendering, which will enable “running machine learning and neural filters locally or through network rendering.”

This is the first time Otoy has released a preview build for the following year, so it's difficult to say when the features in OctaneRender 2026.1 will become stable. It’s also hard to predict whether all features will be ready for release by 2026, especially since meshlets have been announced for three years but have yet to reach even the alpha stage. For these reasons, it’s probably best to view OctaneRender 2026.1 as an opportunity to test some experimental technologies still in development by Otoy.

Octane Render 2025.1 is currently in public beta, while Octane Render 2026.1 is in the alpha stage. Otoy has not announced an official release date yet, but historically it has taken between three to six months for a beta version to transition into a stable release.

OctaneRender is compatible with Windows 10 and above and Linux, and it requires an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA 10 support. Octane X, the macOS version, is compatible with macOS 14.0 and later on Apple M1 and later processors, as well as iPadOS 17.0+ on devices with A12 Bionic chips or later.
The software is available through a subscription to Otoy Studio+, priced at €23.95 per month, which includes integration plugins for 21 DCC applications and various third-party software products. Additionally, Otoy offers free "simple" versions of OctaneRender and Octane X, which are limited to single GPU rendering and come with fewer DCC integration plugins.