Last Updated: 11 / 09 / 2009

NVIDIA® OptiX™ ray tracing engine

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The NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine is a programmable ray tracing pipeline for software developers to achieve extremely fast ray tracing results on NVIDIA GPUs using traditional C programming. While the potential of ultra-fast ray tracing is being quickly recognized by those serving automotive styling, design visualization, and visual effects, the OptiX engine is also being leveraged in non-rendering disciplines such as optical & acoustical design, radiation research, volume calculations, and collision analysis – wherever intensive ray tracing calculations are employed.

Unlike a renderer with a prescribed look, or a language limited to rendering, the OptiX engine is extremely general, enabling software developers to quickly accelerate whatever ray tracing task they wish and run it on standard hardware. Flexibility within OptiX begins by abstracting the execution to single rays, greatly simplifying calculations to one ray at a time. The data each ray carries and gathers is fully customizable, easily extending ray calculations beyond basic image creation. The data fed to OptiX is also programmable, enabling programmable shading for new techniques, programmable intersection for procedurally accurate surface types, and programmable cameras for new composition potential.

Obtaining exceptional performance is easy to achieve with the OptiX engine as it provides applications with critical features such as: parallelism (both within the GPU and across GPUs); state of the art acceleration structures (BVH and KD trees); and cutting edge traversal algorithms. Exploiting the GPU is also managed through built-in load balancing, the scheduling of shading & tracing, and recursion methods. A tight coupling with graphics APIs like OpenGL is also provided, allowing raster and ray tracing approaches to be combined for additional flexibility and performance possibilities.

OptiX applications realize substantial performance as NVIDIA GPUs continue to advance. NVIDIA's current "GT200" GPU architecture enabled OptiX to double its speed as compared to its previous "G80" architecture, and preliminary tests show that NVIDIA's next generation "Fermi" GPU architecture will deliver substantial OptiX performances gains yet again. As interactive ray tracing will soon be a reasonable consideration in various consumer applications, OptiX will add support for NVIDIA GeForce® GPUs when Fermi-based products are available, including support for at least GT200 based GeForce products.

NVIDIA OptiX Now Available

The OptiX engine has been in private testing at over 100 sites worldwide since the spring of 2009, with ray tracing developers already utilizing it to redefine interactive possibilities. You can join these ranks and explore how GPU ray tracing can transform your application by simply downloading the OptiX SDK and developing on standard graphics hardware. The OptiX SDK is free of charge and the engine is free to license in applications.

OptiX SDK Download

System Requirements

Operating System: 32 or 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Linux
CPU: x86 compatible
System Memory: matches graphics board recommendations
GPU*: NVIDIA Quadro FX or NVIDIA Tesla (GT200 class required for multi-GPU scaling and technical support)
Frame buffer memory: varies with data complexity
Driver: NVIDIA Unified Driver r190 or later, CUDA toolkit 2.3 or later
C/C++ Compiler: Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, along with CMAKE

*NVIDIA GeForce to be supported with NVIDIA's upcoming "Fermi" GPU architecture.