Quote - > Quote - Just how much extra work is there with Octane? 

Well, that's a pretty subjective thing. Some will say not much, some will say too much!

I tried the Poser plug-in about 6 months ago. It was fast with my Nvidia card dedicated to Octane and a Radeon for the main screen (or was it the other way around? can't recall) The speed was there but I was put off by the need to duplicate or re-create textures. And re-do the lighting. And basically just learn the ins and outs of a new program. In general it was more fiddling with Octane thanI wanted to do to recreate what I already had in Poser -- just to speed up rendering.

I do a lot of progress renders so I think a GPU approach would be great, but I am not usually willing to do the extra work to "re-invent" a complex image in Octane. 

~R 

Bummer.  Rendering speeds have been getting to me, and with the processing power of the newer graphics cards looked like a good solution. 

Also keep in mind extra computers, with quad core processors being cheap and you have Pro for Queue Manager.  You may be able to pick up used ones cheap.