In case anyone is interested, Octane version 2.21.1 introduced the support of "Out of Core" textures - which means users are no longer constrained to the amount a RAM on their video cards for large scenes/texture sets!!

From the Otoy web site:

"Out-of-core textures allow you to use more textures than would fit in the graphic memory, by keeping them in the host memory. Of course, the data needs to be sent to the GPU while rendering therefore slowing the rendering down. If you don't use out-of-core textures rendering, speed is not affected.

Out-of-core textures come also with another restriction: They must be stored in non-swappable memory which is of course limited. So when you use up all your host memory for out-of-core textures, bad things will happen, since the system can't make room for other processes. Since out-of-core memory is shared between GPUs, you can't turn on/off devices while using out-of-core textures.

You can enabled and configure the out-of-core memory system via the application preferences. For net render slaves you can specify the out-of-core memory options during the installation of the daemon."This feature is now available via the Octane plugin for Carrara. Just doing some quick tests, I've had over 5Gb of textures in system RAM, and have been able to load and render a scene with five clothed V4's and three clothed M4's, Faveral's Medieval Docks, and several props (it only took about 2Gb of system RAM and 2.7 Gb of video RAM). I do get a bit of a performance hit, though a lot of that I think is due to the extra geometry in the scene (adding geometry always slows rendering a bit). I tested just restricting the GPU VRAM to force textures into System RAM and saw no noticeable slow down, but when adding additional figures to the scene to increase the RAM usage, I got a max of about 12% drop in performance. IMHO, given the render speed of Octane, a 12% drop in performance isn't bad at all (36 seconds more for a 5 min. render, or 7 minutes longer for a 1 hour render)

This should allow very large/complex scenes to be rendered on 2-3Gb cards (or even 1Gb cards). Here is a link to a scene done with the Poser plugin on a 3Gb card that has 18 figures in it - quite impressive (further down the page the author notes that he is up to 30 figures in the scene)!! http://maskdemon.deviantart.com/art/render-Out-of-Core-Textures-system-ram-not-vram-512307016

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