OptiX advanced samples on github

In case you’re missing some of the more advanced samples like “glass” that were removed from the
SDK in OptiX 4.0, we’ve put a handful of them on github:

OptiX Advanced Samples

Along the way we switched from GLUT to GLFW and added UIs with the imgui library; for
example, the new “optixGlass” sample has sliders for glass color and other things.

Build instructions for Linux and Windows are in the top level directory.

-Dylan

3 Likes

The OptiX Advanced Samples repository on github received some updates in the meantime.

To accompany the GTC 2018 tutorial S8518 - An Introduction to NVIDIA OptiX, a set of nine increasingly complex examples has been added inside the optixIntroduction sub-folder.

The extensive README on this site explains which different features each example added.
[url]https://github.com/nvpro-samples/optix_advanced_samples/tree/master/src/optixIntroduction[/url]
Although it starts very basic, the tutorial quickly provides the necessary foundation for a renderer implementation with quite a set of features already in form of an elegant and easy to extend uni-directional path tracer architecture.

The recording and slides (without animations) of the GTC presentation are publicly available on
[url]http://on-demand-gtc.gputechconf.com/gtcnew/on-demand-gtc.php[/url]

Then another new example optixParticleVolumes had been added recently.
It demonstrates how to use OptiX’ BVH traversal for volumetric depth samples of unstructured geometry and provides a reference for particle volume rendering, similar to splatting, within OptiX.
[url]https://github.com/nvpro-samples/optix_advanced_samples/tree/master/src/optixParticleVolumes[/url]

2 Likes

An new OptiX Introduction example optixIntro_10 has been added to show how to use the OptiX 5.1.0 HDR DL Denoiser implementation.

With the OptiX 5.1.0 release, the built-in DL denoiser has been improved to support HDR input directly, which allows to move the tone-mapping into the final post-processing after the denoising stage again.

Please compare the necessary code changes against the optixIntro_09 example which had shown how to use the standard DL denoiser as supported since OptiX 5.0.0.

1 Like

I’m happy to announce that new OptiX 7 advanced samples have gone live here:

https://github.com/NVIDIA/OptiX_Apps

The first two examples, intro_runtime and intro_driver, both port the seventh introduction example from the OptiX 5/6 API to the OptiX 7 API, using the CUDA Runtime API resp. the CUDA Driver API.

The intro_denoiser example adds the OptiX 7 HDR DL denoiser on top, with RGB, RGB+Albedo or RGB+Albedo+Normal buffers in either float4 or half4 buffer formats controlled via a compile time option.
It’s effectively matching the optixIntro_10 advanced sample, except for the motion blur and added normal buffer support.

The rtigo3 example is demonstrating different strategies for multi-GPU rendering distribution, where all GPUs work on the same frame, combined with different OpenGL interop methods. Of course it also works with single-GPU for comparisons.
Its mode of operation and scene layout is controlled by two simple text files. The rendering resolution is independent of the window size. It also contains code to load triangle mesh data from any file format supported by the ASSIMP library.

Please read the README.md and system_*.txt and scene_*.txt files inside the repository for more information.

For more introductory examples using the OptiX 7 API, please refer to the OptiX 7 SIGGRAPH course examples first:
https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1058310/optix/optix-7-0-release/

3 Likes

The OptiX 7 advanced samples have been updated to also compile with the OptiX SDK 7.1.0 now.

The OptiX SDK 7.1.0 release changed a few API structures (listed in its release notes) which required some small adjustments to the existing OptiX SDK 7.0.0 based examples to compile. Look for compile-time decisions based on OPTIX_VERSION to find the differences.

Currently the examples still build against OptiX 7.0.0 by default. To change that, please simply replace the find_package(OptiX7 REQUIRED) against find_package(OptiX71 REQUIRED) in each individual example’s CMakeLists.txt you want to switch to the new SDK.

Note that the OptiX SDK 7.1.0 strictly requires R450 drivers and only works on Maxwell GPUs and newer.

I also overhauled the default structure initializations, the text output, and fixed a multi-GPU synchronization issue inside the rtigo3 compositor() routine.

A new example called nvlink_shared has been added, which demonstrates how to share textures and/or geometry acceleration structures among the GPU devices inside an NVLINK configuration to increase the loadable scene size.
It’s derived from the existing rtigo3 example but moved the resource management from the Device class up to the Raytracer class because that decides which device shares what resource.

Please read the README.md and source code comments for more information. Find them via the link in the post above.

1 Like

The OptiX 7 advanced samples have been updated to automatically use the latest installed OptiX SDK version which incudes support for OptiX SDK 7.2.0 now (Oct. 2020) and in the meantime OptiX 7.4.0.

Support for the NVIDIA Management Library (NVML) has been added to the nvlink_shared and rtigo3 examples to determine the system’s current NVLINK topology. That allows supporting arbitrary NVLINK configurations, esp. with more than two GPUs installed.

A new introduction example intro_motion_blur has been added as well.
It demonstrates how to implement motion blur with linear matrix transforms, scale-rotate-translate (SRT) motion transforms, and optional camera motion blur inside an animation timeline where frame number, frames per seconds, object velocity and angular velocity of the rotating object can be changed interactively. This example is only built when using the OptiX SDK 7.2.0 and newer.

Please always refer to the updated README.me which contains more information.

1 Like

The OptiX 7 advanced samples have been updated to support Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 and OptiX SDK 7.5.0 now.

When using OptiX SDK 7.5.0 and CUDA Toolkit 11.7 or newer, the examples’ CMakeLists.txt scripts will automatically switch the NVCC output from PTX to OptiX IR.
https://raytracing-docs.nvidia.com/optix7/guide/index.html#program_pipeline_creation#program-input

Additionally the CMake macro generating the custom build rules for the input *.cu files has been replaced against one which covers both *.ptx and *.optixir outputs (see NVCUDA_COMPILE_MODULE).

The examples themselves select between *.ptx and *.optixir input files at compile time, depending on the USE_OPTIX_IR definition added by the CMake scripts. That required centralizing the module filename definitions, which then lead to a more streamlined handling of the OptixModule, OptixProgramGroupDesc and OptixProgramGroup objects.

1 Like

The OptiX 7 advanced examples have been updated with two new examples (as explained inside the README.md there).

rtigo9 is similar to nvlink_shared, but optimized for single-GPU as well to not do the compositing step unless multiple GPUs are used. The main difference is that it shows how to implement more light types.

It’s supporting the following light types:

  • Constant environment light: Uniformly sampled, constant HDR color built from emission color and multiplier.
  • Spherical environment map light: Importance sampled area light. Now supporting arbitrary orientations of the enviroment via a rotation matrix. Also supporting low dynamic range textures scaled by the emission multiplier (as in all light types).
  • Point light: Singular light type with or without colored omnidirectional projection texture.
  • Spot light: Singular light type with cone spread angle in range [0, 180] degrees (hemisphere) and falloff (exponent on a cosine), with or without colored projection texture limited to the sphere cap described by the cone angle.
  • IES light: Singular light type (point light) with omnidirectional emission distribution defined by an IES light profile file which gets converted to a float texture on load. With or without additional colored projection texture.
  • Rectangular light: Area light with constant color or importance sampled emission texture. Also supports a cutout opacity texture.
  • Arbitrary triangle mesh light: Uniformly sampled light geometry, with or without emission texture. Also supports a cutout opacity texture.

To be able to define scenes with these different light types, this example’s scene description file format has been enhanced. The camera settings as well as the tonemapper settings defined inside the system description file now can be overridden inside the scene description. The previous hardcoded light definitions inside the system description file have been removed and the scene description has been changed to allow light material definitions and creation of specific light types with these emissive materials, resp. assigning them to arbitrary triangle meshes.
Please read the system_rtigo9_demo.txt and scene_rtigo9_demo.txt files which explain the creation of all supported light types inside a single scene.

Also the previous compile time switch inside the config.h file to enable or disable direct lighting (“next event estimation”) has been converted to a runtime switch which can be toggled inside the GUI. Note that all singular light types do not work without direct lighting enabled because they do not exist as geometry inside the scene and cannot be hit implicitly. (The probability for that is zero. Such lights do not exist in the physical world.)

Additionally to CUDA peer-to-peer data sharing via NVLINK, the rtigo9 example also allows that via PCI-E, but this is absolutely not recommended for geometry for performance reasons. Please read the explanation of the peerToPeer option inside the system description.

rtigo9_demo.png

Light types shown in the image above: The grey background is from a constant environment light.
Then from left to right: point light, point light with projection texture, spot light with cone angle and falloff, spot light with projection texture, IES light, IES light with projection texture, rectangle area light, rectangle area light with importance sampled emission texture, arbitrary mesh light (cow), arbitrary mesh light with emission texture.

rtigo10 is meant to show how to architect a renderer for maximum performance with the fastest possible shadow/visibility ray type implementation and the smallest possible shader binding table layout.

It’s based on rtigo9 and supports the same system and scene description file format but removed support for cutout opacity and surface materials on emissive area light geometry (arbitrary mesh lights). The renderer architecture implements all materials as individual closesthit programs instead of a single closesthit program and direct callable programs per material as in all previous examples above. Lens shaders and the explicit light sampling is still done with direct callable programs per light type for optimal code size.

To reduce the shader binding table size, where the previous examples used a hit record entry per instance with additional data for the geometry vertex attribute data and index data defining the mesh topology plus material and light IDs, the shader binding table in rtigo10 holds only one hit record per material shader which is selected via the instance sbtOffset field. All other data is indexed with via the user defined instanceId field.

On top of that, by not supporting cutout opacity there is no need for anyhit programs in the whole pipeline. The shadow/visibility test ray type is implemented with just a miss shader, which also means there is no need to store hit records for the shadow ray type inside the shader binding table at all.

2 Likes

The OptiX 7 Advanced Examples repository has now been updated to support OptiX SDK 7.6.0.

1 Like

The OptiX 7 Advanced Examples repository has been updated with a new example rtigo9_omm demonstrating the Opacity Micromap (OMM) feature added in OptiX SDK 7.6.0.

It’s using the OptiX Toolkit CUDA Opacity Micromap Baking tool to generate OMM arrays from cutout opacity textures.

OMMs are hardware accelerated on RTX Ada generation GPUs.

The main renderer difference between rtigo9 and rtigo9_omm is the use of the OMMs for materials with cutout opacity.
That required a small change of the automatic GAS instancing because not all GAS can be used with all materials anymore.

The cutout opacity value used inside the anyhit and light sampling routines has been changed from intensity(rgb) to just the alpha channel. (The slots_alpha.png RGB image used in other examples has been replaced by the slots_rgba.png RGBA image where the alpha channel contains the cutout opacity value as well.)

Additionally the shadow/visibility ray implementation must use a different (faster) implementation because fully opaque or fully transparent micro triangle intersections on cutout opacity materials do not invoke the anyhit program anymore when using OMMs, which is their main purpose and performance benefit.

3 Likes

The OptiX 7 Advanced Examples repository now contains a new example named MDL_renderer.

The MDL_renderer project is based on rtigo9 but replaced the previously few simple hardcoded BSDFs with NVIDIA Material Definition Language (MDL) shaders.

If you’re not familiar with the NVIDIA Material Definition Language, please find the MDL Introduction, Handbook, and Language Specifications on the NVIDIA Ray Tracing Documentation site.

The example is based on functionality shown inside the MDL SDK examples optix7 and df_cuda. The renderer architecture stayed very similar, just that all material-related direct callable programs are now generated by the MDL SDK at runtime. Meaning this renderer requires the MDL SDK to compile. There is either the open-source MDL SDK, used while developing this example, or the binary MDL SDK release.

The device code details changed quite a bit though because all shading data structures needed to match to what the MDL-generated code expects and it’s actually more elegant in some areas than the previous examples, especially for the path throughput and pdf handling.

The scene description syntax has been adjusted to allow material references selecting an exported MDL material from a given MDL file. The definition of the hardcoded lights has been changed from taking a material reference to using the scene description emission parameters directly. Arbitrary mesh lights are generated automatically for all geometry instances which have an emissive MDL material assigned.

The system description options added a searchPath option which allows to add arbitrary many paths where MDL files and their resources should be searched for. The system and user path for the MDL vMaterials set via the environment variables MDL_SYSTEM_PATH and MDL_USER_PATH set by the MDL vMaterials installer are automatically added by the application.

Peer-to-peer sharing of MDL texture array resources, measured BSDFs and their CDFs, IES light profiles and their CDFs is supported. The system description option peerToPeer has two new bits (4 and 5) controlling sharing of the MBSDF resp. light profile data among GPU devices in a CUDA peer-to-peer island. If the peerToPeer value is not set, the default is to only share textures because that comes at almost no cost via NVLINK.

Please read the system_mdl_demo.txt or system_mdl_materials.txt and scene_mdl_demo.txt or scene_mdl_vMaterials.txt inside the data folder for more information on additional system and scene options. The data/mdl folder contains quite a number of minimal MDL shaders for individual features, which have been used for testing while implementing the renderer.

The renderer implementation has the following limitations at this time:

  • Volume absorption and scattering assumes homogeneous volume coefficients. There’s simply no volume data primitive in the scene to sample heterogeneous coefficients from.
  • Volume scattering emission intensity not implemented. Goes along with heterogeneous volume scattering support.
  • Geometry displacement not implemented. To be revisited once Displacement Micro Meshes (DMM) are supported by OptiX.
  • uv_tile and animated textures not implemented.
  • rounded_corner_normal() not implemented. That cannot be done by the automatic code generation for the geometry.normal expression.
  • Spot and light profile global_distribution: true not supported by the MDL SDK code generation. Lights will be black then. The renderer supports own point lights with spot and IES distribution though.

Everything else inside the MDL specifications should just work!

2 Likes

The MDL_renderer has now been updated to also support cubic B-spline curve primitives and the MDL Hair BSDF.

Because that requires two texture coordinates to be fully featured, the NUM_TEXTURE_SPACES define has been added to the config.h to allow switching between one and two texture coordinates. If you do not need the hair BSDF, you can set NUM_TEXTURE_SPACES to 1 for a little more performance.

The MDL hair BSDF supports a fully parameterized fiber surface accessible via the state::texture_coordinate(0) providing (uFiber, vFiber, thickness) values, which allows implementing parameter changes along the whole fiber and even around it. The provided mdl/bsdf_hair_uv.mdl material shows this by placing tiny arrows on the fibers pointing from root to tip.

Additionally the second texture coordinate state::texture_coordinate(1) defines a fixed texture coordinate per fiber, which allows coloring of individual fibers depending on some texture value. The image below used a Perlin noise function to produce highlights in the hair, resp. a 2D texture to color the fibers of the fur.hair model (included).

The renderer currently loads only *.hair models which do not have texture coordinates. The example auto-generates a 2D coordinate with a cubemap projection from the root points’ center coordinate. There are better ways to do this when actually growing hair from surfaces, not done in this example. Transparency and color values of *.hair files are ignored. The assigned MDL hair material defines these properties.



Additionally all CUDA Driver API based examples have been made compatible with CUDA 12.x headers.
There was one deprecated device attribute define still used which CUDA 12.x versions renamed.

1 Like

The OptiX 7 Advanced Samples have been updated to support OptiX SDK 7.7.0 now.

Also the MDL_renderer has been improved to support CUDA peer-to-peer sharing of MDL resources across GPU devices for 2D and 3D textures, measured BSDFs and their CDFs, and light profiles and their CDFs.

Please find more information above and inside the README.md inside the github repository.

The OptiX Advanced Samples have been updated to support the OptiX SDK 8.0.0 release.

The major difference in the new OptiX SDK 8.0.0 release is the addition of the Shader Execution Reordering (SER) functionality affecting Ada Lovelace GPUs.
Please read this OptiX Programming Guide chapter for more information:
https://raytracing-docs.nvidia.com/optix8/guide/index.html#shader_execution_reordering#shader-execution-reordering

SER is demonstrated inside the SDK’s optixPathTracer example and inside the MDL_renderer of these advanced examples
https://github.com/NVIDIA/OptiX_Apps/blob/master/apps/MDL_renderer/shaders/raygeneration.cu#L177

This small change from the optixTrace to the new optixTraverse, optixReorder, optixInvoke device functions for SER, where the shader ID is given as coherency hint bits to optixReorder, results in a 55% performance improvement (88 fps to 137 fps) of the scene_mdl_vMaterials.txt scene.
(Benchmarked under Windows 10 and 535.98 drivers on RTX 6000 Ada with interop 0 inside the system_mdl_vMaterials.txt and the application’s benchmark mode (command line option -m 1) measuring the raw raytracing performance without display.)

The Shader Execution Reordering performance is dependent on the amount of local memory used inside the program domain which calls optixReorder.
For example, the MDL_renderer is using 272 bytes of local memory inside the ray generation program of which much is the per ray payload structure.
In an experiment which reduced that size down to 124 bytes by removing the support for nested materials, which reduces the material stack entries, the performance improved by 87% (89 fps to 167 fps) instead. YMMV.

1 Like

The OptiX Advanced Samples have been updated with a new example:

rtigo12 is based on rtigo10 but changed the integrator to handle the throughput, pdf, and lights like the MDL_renderer.

The GGX-Smith BXDF implementation has been replaced with excerpts from the MDL SDK libbsdf to support direct lighting of glossy transparent materials as well.
That means singular light types will now show proper reflections on glossy transparent objects and even caustics (when the roughness is not too smooth) because hitting backfaces will be directly lit from lights on the transmission side which adds radiance.
While changing that, support for Specular and GGX-Smith BTDF materials has been added.

Also homogeneous volume scattering is implemented in this example via a random walk through volumes with scattering coefficients the same way as inside the MDL_renderer.

See scene_rtigo12_*.txt files inside the data folder for example scenes.

(Note that mesh and rect lights are now defined with radiant exitance instead of radiant intensity, so with the diffuse EDF these are 1/PI darker than in rtigo10 but match the MDL_renderer.)


1 Like