Correction: NVIDIA has half-hearted support for OpenCL (an open secret) - except as perceived in its most expensive $500-$1000 and up cards (which probably appear to perform well due to brute strength of their processing capability and I still bet that 1:1 NVIDIA's proprietary baby CUDA will outperform OpenCL on such platforms simply because its good business sense for NVIDIA).
@Rampa, unfortunately your argument is highly generalized and hard to respond to. You talk of the geometry cache as if its the only bottleneck when it comes to rendering - which is an highly inaccurate. I don't understand why you are totally ignoring the bigger picture. One other flaw in your argument is that you actually implicitly admit that the Geometry cache issue has no bearing on the choice of external renderer and can be addressed independently. :-D Further, plugins are not evil... all applications including Maya, C4D, Blender, Daz, Poser, and even Sketchup offer a choice of external plugins (most supporting Octane). Why would it be so bad for iClone?
I disagree @animagic. The indigo beta testers actually confirmed the fatal mismatch (re-read the carefully worded comments in the forums.. reminds me of a politician's subjective-objective doublespeak.. yes I was being diplomatic - but not fooled). Indigo uses 25% of NVIDIA memory for textures - compared to 65% for AMD for example. NVIDIA still doesn't support openCL (which AMD heavily supports) and any comment suggesting that openCL performance is at par with CUDA is highly subjective, misinformed and at worst probably dishonest. I am beta testing indigo as well - with my primary focus being its suitability for iClone user needs. It is important to note that iClone has features like PHYSX that rely on NVIDIA cards and will never work on AMD cards. So we have a future scenario where the external renderer cannot get maximum or optimal performance simply due to hardware incompatibility. The issue is not to get it working but to get it working for the typical iClone user who in all likelihood doesn't have a render farm / high end multi-GPU rig. Then then there's the argument that high end graphics cards (typically costing over $500 - $1,000 + another $500-$1000 for computer upgrade) work well with openCL - it tends not to mention that these same cards work BETTER with CUDA for the same job. Reality is that animation is an *afterthought* for indigo (we keep getting rosy promises though - but reality is a mismatch. Indigo is a stills renderer) whereas OCTANE is right on the money, proven on both still and animation. So, as you can see, the fatal mismatch exists even in v4 and we better make the right choice this time round as iclone users else we only have ourselves to blame! Keep voting...
There is no longer a fatal mismatch as on of the Indigo 4 beta testers has pointed in the RL forum: NVIDIA works as well as AMD. Also, render times have improved. Further, as Rampa explains, any ray-trace renderer may be impractical unless you have access to a render farm.
Adding another ray tracing option has no benefit in addressing the issue people have with Indigo. Any plugin of that type requires a geometry cache be written for each frame. It's how those things work. Please stop voting for this. We have such a solution with Indigo already, and iClone needs to stick to its real-time roots.