Running OptiX on CPU

Gaming and Visualization Technologies Visualization OptiX
1

Hello developers,

First of all I would like to thank all the developers here who supported me in my work.
I have developed an application in OptiX for solving Radiation equations. Now I want to run my optix application completely on CPU to compare the computation time between CPU and GPU.

Is it possible? I am using Optix 3.8.

2

Not really. For meaningful results comparing the raytracing performance itself you would need to have a fully optimized CPU implementation of the same algorithms used inside OptiX. That doesn’t exist.

I would also really recommend to update to OptiX 3.9.0 and remeasure your current data.
Just look at the list of performance improvements in the OptiX 3.9.0 release notes:

[i]Enhancements in OptiX 3.9

  • CUDA 7.5 Toolkit support.
    * Trbvh builds are now twice as fast in OptiX.
    * Faster ray tracing of massive models in both OptiX and OptiX Prime.
  • Access to new texture types available in CUDA 7.5 including MIP-mapped textures, cube textures, and layered textures via gather and fetch.
  • Support for anisotropic texture filtering.
  • Support for half float textures.
    * Reduced CPU overhead for very large node graphs.
  • Prime now supports a watertight ray-triangle intersection mode for improved robustness.
  • Added new dynamicGeometry sample that illustrates performance alternatives for rigid body motion with large node graphs.
  • OpenGL interop now supports GL_SRGB8 and GL_SRGB8_ALPHA8 modes.
  • Fixed a bug where accessing textures on Fermi always returned black.
  • Various bug fixes to VCA support.
    * Improvements to compile times up to 7x of very large user code when using R358 or later drivers on Maxwell GPUs.
    * Various bug fixes and improvements to sample code.
    * Various bug fixes and performance improvements to acceleration structure builders and traversers.[/i]
3

Thank you for your response, I will update my Optix.

I wonder what should I do now, I should compare CPU and GPU computation time to highlight the importance of GPU in this field, can you suggest any thing?