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EntityQ4045938· pop 6· linked from 112 articles

Also known as NVIDIA OptiX, Nvidia OptiX

Nvidia OptiX (OptiX Application Acceleration Engine) is a ray tracing API that was first developed around 2009. The computations are offloaded to the GPUs through either the low-level or the high-level API introduced with CUDA. CUDA is only available for Nvidia's graphics products. Nvidia OptiX is part of Nvidia GameWorks. OptiX is a high-level, or "to-the-algorithm" API, meaning that it is designed to encapsulate the entire algorithm of which ray tracing is a part, not just the ray tracing itself. This is meant to allow the OptiX engine to execute the larger algorithm with great flexibility w

~6 min read

Encyclopedic overview

6 sections
Contents
  • Ray tracing with OptiX
  • OptiX Prime
  • Software using OptiX
  • See also
  • References
  • External links

Nvidia OptiX (OptiX Application Acceleration Engine) is a ray tracing API that was first developed around 2009. The computations are offloaded to the GPUs through either the low-level or the high-level API introduced with CUDA. CUDA is only available for Nvidia's graphics products. Nvidia OptiX is part of Nvidia GameWorks. OptiX is a high-level, or "to-the-algorithm" API, meaning that it is designed to encapsulate the entire algorithm of which ray tracing is a part, not just the ray tracing itself. This is meant to allow the OptiX engine to execute the larger algorithm with great flexibility without application-side changes.

Commonly, video games use rasterization rather than ray tracing for their rendering.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “OptiX” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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