Yes, that could be a problem. Which --gpu-architecture did it use?
CUDA 11 removed support for SM 3.0 (early Kepler) and deprecated all SM versions up to and including 5.0 (Maxwell).
If it tried to compile for SM 3.0 that should fail on CUDA 11.
Note that you can disable the use of the CUDA runtime compiler NVRTC for the SDK examples globally by deselecting the CUDA_NVRTC_ENABLED switch inside the CMake GUI.
Then the CUDA source code will be pre-compiled using the NVCC compiler.
The OptiX 7.1.0 SDK examples use SM 6.0 (Pascal) by default to not get the CUDA 11 deprecation warnings.
If you want to run the examples on Maxwell, you’d need to change the target SM version down to 5.0 again.
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/optix-7-1-issue-with-running-samples-on-a-maxwell-card/140118/2
Note that the built SDK examples will only work at their original location unless there are two environment variables set.
Look at the functions getSampleDir() and samplePTXFilePath().
Here’s why: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/sdk-samples-sutil-getptxstring-file-path/70963/2