Hello -
I’m trying to compile some legacy software that has a dependency on OptiX version 4.1.1 (pre 7.0 release that still bundles the runtime with the SDK).
Is there any way to obtain legacy versions of the SDK for compatibility purposes?
Hi @egsewel,
I’ll find out whether this is possible. Before that, I want to check if this is really what you want - be aware that in order to run your compiled application, you would need both a legacy driver and a legacy GPU - even once compiled it would not run with a current driver nor any GPU that is currently supported (Turing or later). Do you need to be able to run your application, and do you have the legacy hardware and driver needed?
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David.
I am the developer of the legacy software mentioned by @egsewel. The software uses the OptiX Prime API from OptiX SDK v4.1.1, and the Prime API does not require a GPU to run. We are able to run it on hardware with many CPUs and no GPU at our location. The issue is that @egsewel needs to build our software at his location, and we cannot re-distribute the OptiX SDK according to the documentation. Can you please make the OptiX SDK v4.1.1 available to him? It could also be v6.5 or before, since all of those versions include the Prime API.
Ah, got it. We are looking for the archived bits and gathering approvals. We’ll be in touch with a final answer, hopefully early next week.
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David.
BTW, I realize this is likely to generate some eye rolls, so I apologize in advance, and I’m sure you’re already aware, but since I have personally tried this very recently it’s worth mentioning that lately Claude & Codex & others have become very good at porting OptiX Prime and pre-OptiX 7 apps to the latest OptiX SDK, or even pyoptix. It could potentially save you some time & headache, and as a bonus you’d have something that runs on modern GPUs and is at least a couple orders of magnitude faster, if that’s important in this case.
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David.
One of our uses of OptiX is to perform a dense ray trace as the first step of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image generation for large numbers of images, so it is actually very fast to do this on the CPU before performing the rest of the image formation. We perform the full process in parallel with a separate image batch being generated by each process so there is no contention between them.
That makes sense, thank you for the detail. Sharing the legacy SDK was approved, and I’ve sent the links to those with @egsewel in a DM. We couldn’t find the 4.1.1 SDK quickly enough, even though I think they’re around here somewhere… ;)
BTW we appreciate your careful concern over the license that the old SDK shipped with. We can’t exactly fix that retroactively but note that we have worked to fixed this problem with the more recent OptiX 9 SDK, and we now distribute the SDK via GitHub and carefully license the SDK sample files so they have a very permissive license. Hopefully this particular issue won’t ever happen again.
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David.