Python-OptiX is a Python wrapper for the NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine, allowing for GPU-accelerated ray tracing applications in Python.

This package aims to provide a more pythonic, object-oriented interface to OptiX by wrapping the original C-like API using Cython. It does so by primarily relying on 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 supports OptiX 9.0.0 (ABI 105).

Requirements:

• NVIDIA driver R570 or later
• CUDA Toolkit 12.0 or later

Install a recent version of the CUDA Toolkit (12.0+) as well as the OptiX 9.0.0 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, all required headers are not installed by default. conda-environments require installation of the additional cudatoolkit-dev package in order for this package to work.

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 variable is no longer necessary as the embedded headers will be utilized then instead.

export OPTIX_PATH=/path/to/optix
export CUDA_PATH=/path/to/cuda_toolkit
export OPTIX_EMBED_HEADERS=1 # Optional: embedd 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] .

Contributions to Python Optix are welcome! If you find a bug or have a feature request, please open an issue on GitHub. If you want to contribute code, please fork the repository and submit a pull request.

Python Optix is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.