Optix7 core added

[jbikker]

A new core has been added to support the recently released Optix7 SDK. The API for Optix 7 has changed a lot since 6, so a lot changed in the core as well. Good news is that Optix 7 is a lot cleaner and provides much more low-level control over acceleration structure construction and ray traversal, so overall performance got a significant boost: about 35% on RTX hardware.

Code is on Github, as usual.

[straaljager]

A new core has been added to support the recently released Optix7 SDK. The API for Optix 7 has changed a lot since 6, so a lot changed in the core as well. Good news is that Optix 7 is a lot cleaner and provides much more low-level control over acceleration structure construction and ray traversal, so overall performance got a significant boost: about 35% on RTX hardware.

Code is on Github, as usual.

This is awesome news, however I also read the following in your Twitter feed:

Hm, Optix7 is sadly not the fastest option on Pascal and older; Optix6 is faster, and the Optix Prime layer of Optix 5 is faster than that. By a significant margin too: Prime is 57% faster, even with shading included...

Do you see the same performance discrepancy on Turing/RTX? We're planning to move our renderer from Optix 5 (no prime) on Volta GPUs to Optix 7 (or Lighthouse) on RTX GPUs soon and every bit of performance would be welcome.

[jbikker]

On Turing and Volta, Optix 7 is by far the best option. On Pascal and older, Optix Prime is faster, and in my experiments, Optix Prime from Optix 5.x is faster than Optix Prime in 6.x. I am not sure if Prime is still supported by 7.x, although support would be trivial to add (this is basically what Lighthouse does in fact).

[straaljager]

Thanks! That's very encouraging to hear. So Lighthouse is the way to go then

[jbikker]

Well if you need peak performance on RTX and pre-RTX hardware with identitcal output and API then yes.