NVIDIA Launches Interactive Ray Tracing Engine

By DE Editors

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

NVIDIA application acceleration engines unveiled at Siggraph 2009 include:

• NVIDIA OptiX engine for real-time ray tracing
• NVIDIA SceniX engine for managing 3D data and scenes
• NVIDIA CompleX engine for scaling performance across multiple GPUs
• NVIDIA PhysX 64-bit engine for real-time, hyper-realistic physical and environmental effects
 

As the first interactive ray tracing engine to leverage the GPU, 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 NVIDIA Quadro processors, the OptiX engine greatly accelerates the ray tracing used across a spectrum of disciplines, according to the company.

“In one year, NVIDIA has gone from proving interactive GPU ray tracing is possible, to making it available to all,” said Jon Peddie, founder and president of Jon Peddie Research. “Intricate design tasks, such as examining the play of reflection and refraction across surfaces and within glass, can now be examined in real-time by utilizing the OptiX acceleration engine running on Quadro processors. This is a phenomenal milestone for developers and designers alike.”

The NVIDIA SceniX scene management engine provides the interactive core for demanding real-time, professional 3D graphics applications.

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 use the CompleX engine enable users to explore and visualize all their data in full context, instead of piecemeal.

The NVIDIA PhysX 64-bit physics engine brings hyper-realistic, real-time physics to professional applications. 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 and model physical properties.

For more information, visit NVIDIA.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.