Though this is all “interactive” with no caching to disk it at least shows what can be done with viewport shading. We need this in Reactions !!
Embergen has been making big strides these past few months. They primarily focus on game flipbook exports, but have implemented VDB exports for VFX work too. Currently they are limited on what emission shapes can be used, but will be adding support to import your own geo.
I think the biggest bottleneck with getting this real-time playback in C4D is C4D itself. Even Insydium has taken awhile to even figure out a way to port their plugin to GPU processing within C4D. Jascha I believe was the only GPU plug-in in C4D this whole time. A testament to his hard work. 
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Reactions’ volume shader will soon work in the Viewport without illumination. Illumination with simple light types in the viewport could also be added in the future, but i don’t consider this a high priority ATM.
Instead i’m looking into connecting Reactions’ volume shader directly to Arnold, Octane, Redshift and C4D builtin renderers. As you may know, with TFD only Arnold and C4D builtin renderers use the TFD volume shader directly. Many users prefer the TFD volume shader for its curve controls, though. And Reactions’ volume shader improves on the controls some more.
You can already test the current version of Reactions’ volume shader with Redshift in the Reactions standalone app. I’m in the process of connecting it inside the C4D plugin as well.
Playback speeds in C4D depend a lot on the scene content. The tests i’ve been doing with the Reactions C4D plugin so far use few C4D objects. As a result playback speeds are very close to those of the Reactions standalone. We’ll see how long this will hold up. I expect most C4D objects to not be a problem. But there are likely some “bad” types of objects that are costly for playback speed.
Should playback speed be an issue when you’re iterating on objects/sims controlled by Reactions, you always have the option to switch to the standalone (possibly soon by the click of a single button) and bring the elements back into C4D when you’re done.
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I love the way you can use the channel option in arnold and control the shading directly from C4D it just makes things so much better. Redshift is nowhere near as user friendly so if you get a direct link up with RS so it can shade from TFD style settings that would be a real plus. To be honest once I throw in GI which is needed to get the effect that multiple scattering has ( emission itself does not do this) I have to boost all the settings up in RS that the render times are really not a lot better than TFD in C4D on the CPU…and the differences would be eaten up on a render farm. I have not had a chance to look into noise reduction though. There is a new 2020 octane demo I have downloaded so that is going to be an excuse not to do the housework for a while !!
I’m not impressed with embergen. I noticed the quality just isn’t there. Probably because it is cutting corners due to its real-time nature.