Nvidia Introduces OptiX - Ray Tracing Engine

NVIDIA has introduced the NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine, part of a suite of application acceleration engines for software developers.

Ray tracing is a technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light through pixels in an image plane. The technique is capable of producing a very high degree of photorealism; usually higher than that of typical scanline rendering methods, but at a greater computational cost. This makes ray tracing best suited for applications where the image can be rendered slowly ahead of time, such as in still images and film and television special effects, and more poorly suited for real-time applications like computer games where speed is critical. Ray tracing is capable of simulating a wide variety of optical effects, such as reflection and refraction, scattering, and chromatic aberration.

"Thousands of applications are being created today that harness the phenomenal power of GPUs, a clear sign that GPU computing has reached a tipping point. The world of computing is shifting from host-bound processing on CPUs to balanced co-processing on GPUs and CPUs.  NVIDIA application acceleration engines arm developers with the tools they need to further revolutionize both real-time graphics and advanced data analysis." - Nvidia's Jeff Brown.

• The NVIDIA OptiX engine is a programmable ray tracing pipeline enabling software developers to bring new levels of realism to their applications using traditional C programming. By tapping into the parallel computing power of NVIDIA Quadro processors, the OptiX engine accelerates the ray tracing used across a spectrum of disciplines, including: photorealistic rendering, automotive styling, acoustical design, optics simulation, volume calculations and radiation research.
• The NVIDIA SceniX scene management engine provides the interactive core for real-time, professional 3D graphics applications.
• The NVIDIA CompleX scene scaling engine enables applications to maintain interactivity when working with large and complex models.
• The NVIDIA PhysX 64-bit physics engine brings realistic, real-time physics to professional applications. Already a proven and popular solution within the computer games industry, the 64-bit version of PhysX will permit more accurate calculations on far larger data sets for engineers, designers and animators wanting to interrogate their data, model physical properties and breathe life into their work.

NVIDIA application acceleration engines are available from the NVIDIA Developer Zone at no charge. The SceniX and CompleX engines can be downloaded at http://developer.nvidia.com/page/home. The OptiX and PhysX 64-bit engines will be available in fall of 2009. Interactive ray tracing examples using the pre-release OptiX engine can be downloaded at http://developer.nvidia.com/object/optix-examples and run on NVIDIA Quadro FX processors.