Card support and different optix / cuda versions

Gaming and Visualization Technologies Visualization OptiX
1

Hi.
I have a question about which cards are supported in which versions.
The following two points have been very clearly communicated throughout:

  • Optix 3.8 / CUDA 7.0 - Fermi, Kepler & Maxwell.
  • Optix 4.0.2 / CUDA 7.5 - Kepler, Maxwell & Pascal.

My question is about the two in-between versions, 3.9 & 3.9.1

Fermi

  • 3.9 Release Notes: "CUDA capable devices of Compute Capability 2.0 (“Fermi”) or higher are supported on GeForce, Quadro, or Tesla class NVIDIA products."
  • 4.0.0 Release Notes: "Support for Fermi class GPUs has been removed."
  • 4.0.2 Release Notes: "All NVIDIA GPUs of Compute Capability 3.0 (Kepler) or higher are supported. Note that this is a change from OptiX 3.9, as Fermi class GPUs are no longer supported."

Pascal

So here comes my actual question: Am I understanding correctly, that version 3.9.1 supports both Pascal and Fermi architectures? If yes, does it matter if I use CUDA sdk 7.0 or 7.5 to compile my code (in and for Windows only)?

Thanks!

2

OptiX 3.9.1 used with CUDA skd 7.5 supports both Pascal and Fermi architectures. I’m not sure about 7.0.

3

The CUDA requirement applies only to the driver on the system on which the optix-based application is run. The CUDA toolkit version used to compile input PTX for the optix API is basically unrestricted. After all we want old optix-based applications (with pre-compiled PTX) to be able to drop in a newer optix lib and still run.