OptiXTM: A General Purpose Ray Tracing Engine

The OptiXTM engine is a programmable ray tracing system designed for NVIDIA® GPUs and other highly parallel architectures. OptiX builds on the key observation that most ray tracing algorithms can be implemented using a small set of programmable operations. Consequently, the core of OptiX is a domain-specific just-in-time compiler that generates custom ray tracing kernels by combining user-supplied programs for ray generation, material shading, object intersection, and scene traversal. This enables the implementation of a highly diverse set of ray tracing-based algorithms and applications, including interactive rendering, offline rendering, collision detection systems, artificial intelligence queries, and scientific simulations such as sound propagation. OptiX achieves high performance through a compact object model and application of several ray tracing-specific compiler optimizations. For ease of use it exposes a single-ray programming model with full support for recursion and a dynamic dispatch mechanism similar to virtual function calls. CR Categories: I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism; D.2.11 [Software Architectures]: Domainspecific architectures; I.3.1 [Computer Graphics]: Hardware Architectures—;