OTOY Releases OctaneRender 2026.4 Bringing SPZ V4 and Lowering VRAM Usage

OTOY has released OctaneRender 2026.4, an update to its path traced renderer that broadens gaussian splat support with SPZ v4 ingestion, reduced GPU memory usage for splats, a fix for rendering scenes above 30 million splat primitives, and corrections to spherical harmonics handling, alongside extending its Neural Radiance Cache to macOS and to network rendering.

2026.4 adds support for SPZ v4, the latest revision of the compact SPZ splat container, letting Octane read the newer format files from Niantic. That sits on top of the integration OTOY shipped at the start of the year, when OctaneRender 2026.1 Alpha became one of the first commercial render engines to treat Gaussian splats as a native primitive, refined through the 2026.1 beta and continued into a production primitive in 2026.2. Unlike the rasterization based viewers most splats live in, Octane renders them fully path traced, so splats contribute to scene lighting, appear in reflections and refractions, and cast shadows.

2026.4 reduces GPU memory usage for Gaussian splats and fixes a CUDA error that previously broke rendering of huge splat scenes above 30 million primitives. On the fidelity side, OTOY clarified and fixed its spherical harmonics handling. Octane currently supports SH up to degree 3, and 2026.4 fixes a bug loading .PLY files that carry degree-4 SH as well as a bug where extra spherical harmonics read from .PLY could be loaded incorrectly, both of which affect how accurately a splat’s view-dependent color reproduces.

Beyond splats, the release extends Octane’s Neural Radiance Cache, its neural path tracing accelerator, to macOS (requiring macOS 15 or newer) and adds NRC support to network rendering, and it introduces support for Apple’s MacBook Neo. The minimum NVIDIA driver moves to R555 (R572 for GeForce RTX 50-series) and the macOS floor is 14.5.

OctaneRender 2026.4 is available now from the OTOY forums.