I am a student doing my Master Thesis in KIT (Karlsruhe, Germany).
I am developing a method of ray tracing for radars to be integrated in autonomous driving cars.
I would like to use NVIDIA OptiX in my calculations as well as for the ray tracing mechanism.
For that, I would like to ask if the developer team can share some examples with me about this topic and some useful information about how to use the software directly on ray tracing methods.
Also, I would like to know if the software can run on any regular PC or if it should have a certain GPU capacity, or some special characteristics.
OptiX is a high-level GPU accelerated ray casting SDK. If you can express an algorithm by tracing rays, it should be possible to implement and accelerate that with OptiX.
The OptiX SDK comes with various examples explaining individual features it supports. Then there are the some OptiX Advanced Samples you can find on github. Link in one of the sticky posts on this sub-forum.
You need an NVIDIA GPU and the architectures supported by the current version are Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta.
The newer the architecture, the higher-end the GPU, and the more VRAM, the better it will perform.
Wikipedia has a decoder for which GPU is on which NVIDIA board.
Please read the OptiX Release Notes for what the other prerequisites are to develop applications using OptiX.