NVIDIA OptiX is the API for GPU-accelerated ray tracing with CUDA, and is often used to render scenes containing a wide variety of objects and materials. During an OptiX launch, when a ray intersects a geometric primitive, a hit shader is executed. The question of which shader is executed for a given intersection is answered by the Shader Binding Table (SBT). The SBT may also be used to map input…
]]>Conventional 3D rendering has typically used a process called rasterization since the 1990s. Rasterization uses objects created from a mesh of triangles or polygons to represent a 3D model of an object. The rendering pipeline then converts each triangle of the 3D models into pixels on a 2D image plane. These pixels may then be further processed or “shaded” before final display on the screen.
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