Archive notice: This article was originally published on August 5, 2009. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
At SIGGRAPH, NVIDIA presented the NVIDIA OptiX Ray Tracing Engine, part of a new suite of engines for accelerating applications. It is intended to allow software engineers to integrate high-performance functionality into applications while reducing development time.
NVIDIA’s application-acceleration solutions being presented at SIGGRAPH 2009 include the NVIDIA OptiX engines (real-time ray tracing), NVIDIA SceniX (management of 3D data and scenes), NVIDIA CompleX (performance scaling across multiple GPUs) and NVIDIA PhysX 64-bit (realistic rendering of physical effects in real time).
According to the manufacturer, the NVIDIA OptiX Engine is the world’s first interactive ray-tracing engine to use GPU performance. The ray-tracing solution promises to enable software developers to give applications a new level of realism using traditional C programming. By harnessing the massively parallel computing power of NVIDIA’s Quadro processors, the OptiX Engine significantly accelerates ray tracing across applications ranging from photorealistic rendering, automotive design and optical simulations to radiation analysis, as the company emphasises.
“Thousands of applications are already being written today that use the power of GPUs—a clear sign that GPU computing has ushered in a turning point. Computing power is no longer provided by the CPU alone, but jointly by GPUs and CPUs,” explains Jeff Brown, General Manager Professional Solutions at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA’s application-acceleration engines give developers exactly the tools they need for real-time graphics rendering and optimised data analysis.”
According to NVIDIA, the NVIDIA SceniX Engine enables professional 3D graphics applications to be realised in real time, both in leading products such as RTT DeltaGen and Autodesk Showcase and in in-house solutions for visualisation, simulation, medical imaging or scientific and technical research.
The NVIDIA CompleX Engine ensures application interactivity even when working with large and complex data models. By automatically using the memory and computing power of multiple GPUs in Quadro Plex systems, the CompleX Engine allows data to be visualised in its full context rather than only in fragments.
The NVIDIA PhysX 64-bit physics engine enables realistic physics simulations in real time in professional applications. Already proven in computer games, the 64-bit version gives engineers and designers the ability to perform precise calculations on a larger data set.
NVIDIA will present the new solutions this week at SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans at stand 2101.
