We’ve written about the NVIDIA Optix ray-tracing API (which used to be called NVIRT) once or twice before.  Well, today it is finally available – for free.  While it’s very nice of NVIDIA to make this available, there are a few caveats.

We already knew Optix would only work on NVIDIA hardware (duh), but the system requirements reveal another unwelcome fact; it does not even run on GeForce cards, only Tesla and Quadro (which are significantly more expensive than GeForce despite being based on exactly the same chips).  They say GeForce will be supported on their new Fermi architecture – I call shenanigans.