Python wrapper for the OptiX 7 raytracing engine.

Python-OptiX wraps the original OptiX C-like API using Cython while aiming to provide a more pythonic, object-oriented interface using the CuPy package.

Only Linux is officially supported at the moment. Experimental windows support is available.

Python-OptiX always supports the most recent version of the OptiX SDK. The current version therefore supports OptiX 7.6.0

Install a recent version of the CUDA Toolkit and the OptiX 7.6.0 SDK

Make sure the CUDA header files are installed as well.

Note, that for some variants of the CUDA Toolkit, like the one installed by the conda package manager, these are not installed by default. conda-environments require the additional cudatoolkit-dev package.

python-optix requires both the OptiX as well as the CUDA include path during setup as well as runtime to compile the CUDA kernels. Therefore, it is necessary to either add both locations to the system PATH or set the CUDA_PATH and OPTIX_PATH variables to the respective locations.

The setup additionally has the option to embed the OptiX header files into the python-optix installation. If the variable OPTIX_EMBED_HEADERS is set to 1, the setup will copy the headers from the OptiX SDK directory into the generated wheel.

If this option was chosen during setup, setting the OPTIX_PATH is no longer required as the embedded headers will be utilized then.

export OPTIX_PATH=/path/to/optix
export CUDA_PATH=/path/to/cuda_toolkit
export OPTIX_EMBED_HEADERS=1 # embed the optix headers into the package
python -m pip install python-optix

git clone https://github.com/mortacious/python-optix.git
cd python-optix
export OPTIX_PATH=/path/to/optix
export CUDA_PATH=/path/to/cuda_toolkit
export OPTIX_EMBED_HEADERS=1 # embed the optix headers into the package
python -m pip install [-e] .