Hello,
I plan to purchase a GPU to perform simulations with the software Wireless InSite that uses Optix 4.1.0 and I am unsure which GPUs would be compatible.
In the system requirements is says that CUDA capable cards with compute capability between 3.0 and 6.1 should be supported. According to the release notes for Optix 4.1 however, also all other GPUs with compute capability at least 3.0 are compatible with Optix 4.1.0.
Could somebody confirm if also GPUs with a compute capability >6.1 work with Optix 4.1.0, or could I run into issues with a more powerful card?
Thank you
OptiX 4.1.0 is from February 2017. Given the OptiX release notes information and the releases of GPU generations it should support GPU architectures from Kepler to Pascal, which matches the information on the vendor’s site.
This is something between you and the software vendor to determine, for example, if there are certified system configurations which are known to work.
These old OptiX SDK versions aren’t tested anymore. Given that even OptiX 5 versions are known to be incompatible with the Ampere GPU generation, I doubt that OptiX 4 and newer GPU architectures (Volta, Turing, Ampere) are compatible. Even if, especially current RTX boards would not be well supported by that really outdated OptiX version because ray tracing running on the hardware RT cores in RTX boards requires at least OptiX 6.
The current status of the software defines the requirements. They won’t improve without changing the software. If the software vendor wanted to support ray tracing on current GPU generations, the implementation should have been updated to OptiX 6.5.0 or better rewritten for OptiX 7 versions for optimal performance long ago.