The NVIDIA® OptiX™ ray tracing engine is a programmable system designed for NVIDIA GPUs and other highly parallel architectures. The OptiX engine 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.

We present a technique for large matrix-matrix multiplies using low cost graphics hardware. The result is computed by literally visualizing the computations of a simple parallel processing algorithm. Current graphics hardware technology has limited precision and thus limits immediate applicability of our algorithm. We include results demonstrating proof of concept, correctness, speedup, and a simple application. This is therefore forward looking research: a technique ready for technology on the horizon.

We present an extension to texture mapping that supports the representation of 3-D surface details and view motion parallax. The results are correct for viewpoints that are static or moving, far away or nearby. Our approach is very simple: a relief texture (texture extended with an orthogonal displacement per texel) is mapped onto a polygon using a two-step process: First, it is converted into an ordinary texture using a surprisingly simple 1-D forward transform. The resulting texture is then mapped onto the polygon using standard texture mapping. The 1-D warping functions work in texture coordinates to handle the parallax and visibility changes that result from the 3-D shape of the displacement surface. The subsequent texture-mapping operation handles the transformation from texture to screen coordinates.