NVIDIA® OptiX™ ray tracing engine examples

The file downloads on this page are ready to use, self contained examples of interactive ray tracing from the SDK of the NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine. To run these examples, you will need an NVIDIA Quadro FX graphics board and an R190 or later NVIDIA graphics driver. NVIDIA Tesla compute solutions are also supported for adding additional performance in conjunction with a Quadro FX board.

The OptiX engine runs entirely on the NVIDIA CUDA compute architecture, with its performance scaling linearly as the number of CUDA cores increase within the GPU. In addition, the latest generation GPUs found in the Quadro FX 3800, 4800, and 5800 boards have additional compute capabilities that give OptiX a further performance boost. As a result, OptiX applications will typically be 3 to 4 times faster on these GPUs than on their immediate predecessors (Quadro FX 3600, 4600, 5600).

As with most ray traced rendering, higher resolutions take proportionally longer to render. A Quadro FX 3800 is recommended for basic operation, while multiple GPUs are recommended for HD resolutions. Multiple GPUs are supported if they are GT200 architecture (e.g., Quadro FX 3800 or higher) and not in SLI mode. NVIDIA does not recommend trying these examples with GPUs having less than 64 CUDA cores.

The following interactive examples are part of a larger set of source code examples that are included with the OptiX software developer kit available here: OptiX SDK Download:

	Whitted This seminal example of ray tracing made famous by Turner Whitted demonstrates reflection and refraction with procedural geometry and materials	Windows
	Cook This example made famous by Rob Cook demonstrates distribution ray tracing for generating glossy reflections, depth of field and object motion blur.	Windows
	Julia A completely procedural scene demonstrating ray-fractal intersection and real-time ambient occlusion with constant deformation.	Windows
	Glass This example demonstrates dielectric materials for representing realistic glass with extensive reflection and refraction.	Windows
	Whirligig A continuous animation demonstrates the speed of updating object transforms and material properties while generating reflections and casting shadows.	Windows
	Ambient Occlusion Ambient occlusion is progressively generated within an interactive scene. Custom OBJ files can be processed via drag and drop to the .exe or shortcut.	Windows

Please visit the OptiX Forum to post comments about these samples.

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