Issues regarding the installation and usage of OptiX haven’t been resolved for over a year

Gaming and Visualization Technologies Visualization OptiX
1

OptiX is really hard to install. Is there a systematic tutorial or AI guidance? I’ve installed it more than ten times and it keeps reporting errors. Neither version 8.0 nor 9.0 works. The tutorial says to update the latest driver, install CMake, and CUDA Toolkit 11.6. And then what? OptiX doesn’t have a dedicated software interface, just an API. I opened the configuration in cmake.gui, generated the project, then went into VS2022, set optixHello as the startup project, and ran it. Then what? What’s the expected effect? Aren’t there OptiX samples? What effects do they have? No image effects were generated, and there’s no feedback at all. This is so terrible. I’ve been working on it for a year, and there isn’t much relevant information. I’m extremely disappointed! Is there a technical expert who can explain this?

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Hi @yuhang_h0224 and welcome to the OptiX forum, probably the best source of information on OptiX. You already know the SDK samples because you managed to configure, compile and run them. A starting point full of links to docs and code is OptiX 9.0 Release - #5 by dhart

I assume you installed the SDK (on Windows?) from NVIDIA OptiX™ Downloads | NVIDIA Developer

The SDK samples you already know have many useful examples, like optixTriangle, optixMeshViewer, a basic but complete path traceroptixPathTracer, and recent features like clusters (aka megageometry) optixClusterStructuredMesh, optixClusterUnstructuredMesh.

optixHello.cpp is commented for each phase of the OptiX API. If you look at the (only) CUDA kernel draw_solid_color.cu it shows that whatever color is in the shader binding table’s data field, this will be used for all pixels (each pixel corresponds to a ray shot from the camera position, this is a ray generation kernel infact).

I wonder what you mean with “software interface”? The OptiX API is an interface and it is documented (Programming Guide and API Guide in the SDK’s docs folder).

For problem fixing: please provide the following system configuration information:

  • OS version
  • installed GPU(s)
  • VRAM amount
  • display driver version
  • OptiX (major.minor.micro) version
  • CUDA toolkit version (major.minor).
  • host compiler version
  • the exact error string