nVidia has introduced the OptiX interactive ray tracing engine, which is part of a suite of application-acceleration engines aimed software developers who create high-end 3D suites. These engines are designed to be integrated into 3D modelling, animation and rendering suites, providing acceleration by tapping nVidia's Quadro FX line of graphics cards.

nVidia application acceleration engines unveiled at Siggraph 2009 include the OptiX engine for real-time ray tracing, the SceniX engine for managing 3D data and scenes, the CompleX engine for scaling performance across multiple GPUs, and the PhysX 64-bit engine for real-time, hyper-realistic physical and environmental effects

Described as "the world's first interactive ray tracing engine to leverage the GPU", by nVidia, the OptiX engine is a programmable ray tracing pipeline enabling software developers to easily bring extra realism to their applications using traditional C programming. By tapping into Quadro processors, the OptiX engine accelerates photorealistic rendering.

The SceniX scene management engine provides the interactive core for real-time, professional 3D graphics applications. The CompleX scene scaling engine enables applications to maintain interactivity when working with extremely large and complex models.

Already widely used within the computer games industry, the 64-bit version of PhysX will permit more accurate calculations on far larger data sets for engineers, designers and animators wanting to interrogate their data, model physical properties and breathe life into their work.

Real-world applications that take advantage of OptiX have yet to be announced.