NVIDIA Announces First Interactive Ray Tracing Engine

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nvidiaNVIDIA has announced the release of what they call the OptiX ray tracing engine.  OptiX is a part of a suite of NVIDIA acceleration engines that provide additional capabilities to software developers.  OptiX is a programmable ray tracing pipeline that enables software engineers to easily bring additional realism via traditional C programming.  OptiX accelerates ray tracing in a variety of ways, including: photorealistic rendering, automotive styling, acoustical design, optics simulation, volume calculations and radiation research.

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,” said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions, NVIDIA. “NVIDIA application acceleration engines arm developers with the tools they need to further revolutionize both real-time graphics and advanced data analysis.”

The remainder of the acceleration engine suite, include:

The NVIDIA SceniX scene management engine provides the interactive core for demanding real-time, professional 3D graphics applications. Whether used in leading products such as RTT DeltaGen, Autodesk Showcase and Anark Media Studio, or in scores of in-house tools used for advanced visualization, simulation, broadcast graphics, medical imagery, and energy exploration, developers look to the SceniX engine for the interactive framework to manage 3D data and convey results in real-time at high fidelity.

The NVIDIA CompleX scene scaling engine enables applications to maintain interactivity when working with extremely large and complex models. By automatically utilizing the combined memory and processing power of multiple GPUs within Quadro Plex visual computing systems, applications that utilize the CompleX engine enable users to explore and visualize all their data in full context, instead of piecemeal.

The 64-bit physics engine brings hyper-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.

For more info on the new acceleration platforms, read the full release here.

Comments

  1. Its not the first interactive ray tracer in the world. There is a tool which is called iRT (interactive Ray Tracer). It was developed by IBM Austin Research Laboratories for the Cell processor. It was presented on SIGGRAPH conferences. It has more than 2 years already.