NVidia optix 2.0 available for G80 GPU (and higher, of course)

[ker2x]

older version of Optix were available only for Quadro and Tesla card, i just noticed that it now work on all NVidia "Cuda Enabled" GPU (GeForce 8800 and higher).

If you don't know about Optix : it's a Ray Tracing Engine for GPU. That mean : Realtime raytracing \o/
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/optix-home.html
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/optix-examples.html

[cbuchner1]

I used Optix V1.0 to render some Mandelbulbs. I used some hack to patch out the Tesla/Quadro requirement back then

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=150985&view=findpost&p=953287

[ker2x]

I used Optix V1.0 to render some Mandelbulbs. I used some hack to patch out the Tesla/Quadro requirement back then

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=150985&view=findpost&p=953287

Yup, i found this thread. That's why i posted about optix on this forum 

What do you think about optix for rendering 3D Fractal ?
According to what i understood, it's not supposed to be used to build complex object (and a mandelbulb is certainly a very complex object).

[cbuchner1]

What do you think about optix for rendering 3D Fractal ?
According to what i understood, it's not supposed to be used to build complex object (and a mandelbulb is certainly a very complex object).

For Optix the geometry of the mandelbulb is a simply sphere. Things only get slow when your rays intersect the sphere and we have to do the raymarching.

Optix provides a nice infrastructure for sending rays, also shadow and reflected rays. So it's easier than doing everything from scratch.

One of the more interesting aspects of Optix may be that you could integrate one or more bulbs into the same (more complex) 3D scene, including lighting and shadowing. I could imagine a gallery of various Mandelbulb variants that the user can interactively step through. The various bulbs could be displayed in glass displays on marble sockets