OptiX

Nvidia OptiX (OptiX Application Acceleration Engine) is a general purpose ray tracing API for rendering, baking, collision detection, A.I. queries, etc. OptiX is not a renderer but can implement many types of renderers, it implements a modern shader-centric, stateless and bindless design. The computations are offloaded to the GPUs through either the low-level or the high-level API introduced with CUDA. CUDA is only available for Nvdia's graphics products. Nvidia OptiX is part of Nvidia GameWorks. OptiX is a high-level, or "to-the-algorithm" API, meaning that it is designed to encapsulate the entire algorithm of which ray tracing is a part, not just the ray tracing itself. This is meant to allow the OptiX engine to execute the larger algorithm with great flexibility without application-side changes.