OptiX

OptiX is a software development kit from NVIDIA designed for building high-performance ray tracing applications. It provides a programmable, GPU-accelerated framework for implementing a complete ray tracing pipeline, including ray generation, intersection, shading, and miss handling. The API is CUDA-based and is intended to run on NVIDIA GPUs, leveraging hardware-accelerated ray tracing features on RTX hardware where available.

The OptiX framework centers on programmable shader programs and an acceleration structure. Developers define programs for ray generation, closest-hit, any-hit, intersection, and miss, and connect them to geometry through a shader binding table. OptiX manages traversal of acceleration structures (such as BVHs) and integrates shading results into the final image. The library supports both offline production rendering and real-time or interactive workloads, depending on the application's design.

OptiX has been widely adopted in film visual effects, architectural visualization, scientific visualization, and research, as a tool to implement custom ray tracing pipelines without writing a lower-level ray tracer from scratch. It integrates with various rendering and graphics toolchains and is maintained as part of NVIDIA's developer ecosystem. The OptiX API and samples are provided under NVIDIA's licensing terms and are distributed to developers through the NVIDIA Developer Program.

Key features include programmable ray generation and shading, an efficient acceleration structure with traversal, a shader binding table for data routing, and deep integration with CUDA and NVIDIA hardware capabilities for performance.