OptiX 9.0 Release

Gaming and Visualization Technologies Visualization OptiX
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We are very excited to announce the OptiX 9.0 Release!

Highlights from OptiX 9.0 include:

  • Support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series (Blackwell GPUs)
  • New API for building clusters (aka RTX MegaGeometry) - dramatically speeds up BVH builds of large meshes
  • Cooperative Vectors - API for access to NVIDIA Tensor Cores within OptiX shader programs
  • Hardware-accelerated linear curves (LSS) on Blackwell GPUs, plus a new, faster software curve intersector called Rocaps.

Be aware there are a few feature deprecations that may require code changes when upgrading to OptiX 9+. For more information, refer to the OptiX 9 Release Notes. Anyone who is depending on these features and cannot easily transition is strongly encouraged to contact us immediately to discuss the available options.

  • The Displaced Micro-Mesh (DMM) API is now deprecated and is being replaced by the OptiX Clusters API. The DMM API and samples have been removed from the SDK. Any existing applications using DMMs will continue to work with an R570 driver, however they will be disabled in a future driver version. Please transition to the Clusters API.
  • Calling optixTrace in direct callable and OptiX-enabled functions is no longer supported. Please transition to using optixTraverse.
  • OptiX 6 and earlier versions are now deprecated and will be disabled in a future driver.

NVIDIA OptiX 9.0.0 requires that you install an R570+ driver

OptiX download Link

OptiX 9.0 Release Notes

OptiX 9.0 API documentation

OptiX 9.0 Programming Guide The OptiX 9 programming guide is also embedded as a PDF in the OptiX 9 SDK download.

OptiX Toolkit

OptiX Advanced Samples

Previous OptiX 8.1 Release

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We are planning to publish a series of blog posts highlighting the new features in OptiX 9 and RTX in general. The first of these describes the new hardware-accelerated linear curves (LSS).

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Hi Everyone,

We’ve released the OptiX headers on GitHub as a self-contained repro called “optix-dev” (https://github.com/NVIDIA/optix-dev).

This repository only contains the OptiX API headers, the minimum necessary code to build an OptiX application of your own and communicated with the NVIDIA driver. The optix-dev repo does not contain the SDK samples or utility libraries or documentation. Those things will continue to exist in the SDK download that you can get from the usual OptiX download link. This new repo is primarily intended to support people who need automated builds of OptiX applications, for things like testing, CI/CD, Docker containers, etc.

As a convenient version-locked alternative to cloning the git repo, all OptiX releases starting from version 7.0 have been tagged and can be downloaded as a .zip or .tar.gz file using a GitHub release URL with the version tag. For example, here is the release package for OptiX 9: https://github.com/NVIDIA/optix-dev/releases/tag/v9.0.0

–
David.

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For anyone interested or curious, here’s a high level blog post about using the new Cooperative Vectors API in OptiX:

–
David.

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Dylan wrote a nice article highlighting the clusters API in OptiX, also known as “RTX MegaGeometry” in DirectX and Vulkan.

There is an open source sample attached that we have released on GitHub outside of the OptiX SDK.
https://gitlab-master.nvidia.com/optix_micromesh/optix-subd

–
David.