nVidia Launches OptiX Ray Tracing API for QuadroFX and TESLA Products

[caveman-jim]

nVidia launches another proprietary API, this time the world's first interactive engine for ray tracing.

NVIDIA now has the high-octane fuel ready at the pump that software developers need to transform their applications. The NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine is now available for fueling, er, downloading.

As the world’s first interactive ray tracing engine, OptiX leverages the massively parallel power of NVIDIA GPUs for maximum performance and scalability. In providing a programmable ray tracing pipeline, the OptiX engine gives developers great flexibility to accelerate their ray tracing applications, bringing previously unseen levels of interactivity to a wide range of uses. These include auto styling, design visualization and visual effects. It’s also ideal for non-rendering disciplines, such as optical design, acoustical design and collision analysis.

Jeff Brown, NVIDIA’s GM for Professional Solutions, explains why OptiX is invaluable: “This opens the door to a new level of interactive realism. Ray tracing’s inherent parallelism makes it a perfect fit for GPU computing. The OptiX engine makes it easy for developers to exploit that power to create an exciting new class of applications. It enables critical design tasks -- such as examining reflections, refractions and shadow – to be performed now in real-time.”

The OptiX engine, which has been beta tested for the past six months, drastically shortens the development time required to create ray tracing apps by supplying state-of-the-art acceleration approaches that allow developers to concentrate on compelling features – not just performance.

OptiX apps will realize substantial performance gains as NVIDIA GPUs continue to advance. How? Well, NVIDIA’s current GPU architecture nearly doubled OptiX performance over its previous generation. And tests on our upcoming Fermi GPU architecture show performance will greatly increase again.

Also, while today’s release requires NVIDIA’s professional solutions of Quadro FX and NVIDIA Tesla, the OptiX engine will soon expand its support to include NVIDIA GeForce GPUs with Fermi, as forthcoming performance will make ray tracing possible in consumer applications.

The best part? The OptiX ray tracing engine is available free of charge and can be downloaded from the NVIDIA Developer Zone.

Want to see interactive ray tracing in action? Interactive ray tracing examples can also be downloaded and run using NVIDIA Quadro FX professional graphics solutions or NVIDIA Tesla computing solutions.

Source - nTersect Blog

No news yet if anyone has attempted to run this on a Vendor-ID modified AMD card.

[caveman-jim]

Geeks3D ran it on Geforce GTX295 card.

Enforcer on Beyond3D made a tool to allow it to run on other nVidia Geforce cards:

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.p...7&postcount=36

Originally Posted by Enforcer

New patch (for version 1.0 of demos):
http://rapidshare.de/files/48630037/...patch.zip.html
There are 3 new demos:

NVIDIA-OptiX-Ambient-Occlusion-1.0.0.exe
NVIDIA-OptiX-Cook-1.0.0.exe
NVIDIA-OptiX-Glass-1.0.0.exe
NVIDIA-OptiX-JuliaSet-1.0.0.exe
NVIDIA-OptiX-Whirligig-1.0.0.exe
NVIDIA-OptiX-Whitted-1.0.0.exe

edit:binpatch.exe now linked statically with msvcrt

OptiX SDK 1.0.0 released too, and more samples!
patched DLL for SDK 32- and 64-bit:
http://rapidshare.de/files/48630137/...patch.zip.html

[kn00tcn]

looks like preparation for intel

[noko]

This is some rather cool stuff, would be very nice if it runs on Fermi cards and not just Quadro cards. It may run on the 200 series but ray tracing does need double precision floating point to really be worth it, on Fermi that is suppose to be around 10 times faster then on the 200 series GPU. Something like this I commend Nvidia, it is their software intended to run on their hardware. Of course it being free will mean other developers will probably tinker and use it too in their programs. Hmmm now I have to play around with this . . .