The Optix ray tracing engine requires CUDA capable video cards to function. Not all machines have CUDA capable video cards in them. If /opt/optix exists on the machine, it has a CUDA capable video card. See our CUDA page for more information on how cuda is installed in our environment.

Where is the documentation?

Optix Toolkit: /opt/optix/doc/

What changes were made to the Optix installation?

We had to make a few changes to the Optix installation in order to get the samples to build.

We edited /opt/optix/SDK/CMake/FindOptiX.cmake to force OptiX_INSTALL_DIR to be "/opt/optix"
We edited /opt/optix/SDK/CMakeLists.txt to force OptiX_INSTALL_DIR to be "/opt/optix"
We edited /opt/optix/SDK/CMakeLists.txt to add the standard math library (libm.so) to the list of target_link_libraries.

How do I build the examples that are included with the SDK?

You'll need to make a copy of the /opt/optix/SDK/ directory, and you should read the INSTALL-LINUX.txt for an overview

[hbrown@l-lnx102:~]$ mkdir optix-examples
[hbrown@l-lnx102:~]$ cd optix-examples
[hbrown@l-lnx102:optix-examples]$ cp -a /opt/optix/SDK/ .
[hbrown@l-lnx102:optix-examples~]$ cd SDK
[hbrown@l-lnx102:SDK]$ cmake -D CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER:FILEPATH=/opt/gcc43/bin/g++43 \
-D CMAKE_C_COMPILER:FILEPATH=/opt/gcc43/bin/gcc43 \
-D CUDA_CUDA_LIBRARY:FILEPATH=/usr/lib64/nvidia/libcuda.so \
-D OPENGL_gl_LIBRARY:FILEPATH=/usr/lib64/nvidia/libGL.so \
  ~/optix-examples/SDK [hbrown@l-lnx102:SDK]$ make

If you followed the above example, everything is built and the executables are in ~/optix-example/SDK/bin/. Unfortunately, with the 2.1 release of the SDK and our environment, everything doesn't seem to run correctly. The above steps were necessary in order to get anything to build at all. Optix requires gcc to be 4.2 or 4.3, so adding /opt/gcc43/bin to the front of your path may be necessary. You may also need to add /opt/gcc43/lib64 and /opt/gcc43/lib to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH.