Real-Time Rendering » Optix

7 Things for February 7

Eric — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 13:41:03 +0000

Comin’ at ya, lots of one-liners, vs. yesterday’s verbose posting.

Humus notes that the DirectX SDK February 2010 edition is out, and gives the highlights. Finally view depth/stencil buffers in PIX? Sign me up!
I keep forgetting to say: NVIDIA’s OptiX SDK for ray tracing is out, and now works on GeForce graphics cards.
This is how EVE Online (recently named MMO game of the year by PC Gamer) makes its planets. (thanks, Mauricio)
Biggle is a tiny, lightweight OpenGL extension wrapper library.
Every console known to man; click on each for more information.
FreeImage is an open source library for loading images in many different formats that evidently integrates well with DirectX and OpenGL.
The uncanny valley phenomenon may apply just to computer graphics and not-so-much to robots.

NVIDIA Optix Clarification

Naty — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 01:05:59 +0000

Regarding this somewhat alarmist post, NVIDIA were kind enough to contact me and provide some clarification.

After Fermi ships, NVIDIA plan to extend OptiX support to at least GT200 GeForce cards, and possibly down to G80 as well. So eventually you will indeed be able to run Optix on pretty much all consumer NVIDIA cards.

NVIDIA Optix ray-tracing API available – kind of

Naty — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:46:40 +0000

We’ve written about the NVIDIA Optix ray-tracing API (which used to be called NVIRT) once or twice before. Well, today it is finally available – for free. While it’s very nice of NVIDIA to make this available, there are a few caveats.

We already knew Optix would only work on NVIDIA hardware (duh), but the system requirements reveal another unwelcome fact; it does not even run on GeForce cards, only Tesla and Quadro (which are significantly more expensive than GeForce despite being based on exactly the same chips). They say GeForce will be supported on their new Fermi architecture – I call shenanigans.