NVIDIA OptiX SDK 9.1.0 rolls out with R590 driver requirement, drops OptiX 6 driver support
NVIDIA has released OptiX 9.1 (SDK 9.1.0), and it now requires an R590 driver or newer . NVIDIA also says OptiX 6 based applications are no longer supported by the driver in the R590 branch, so older OptiX 6 apps will need an older driver to keep running.
One of the headline changes is that module creation can be cancelled partway through. There is also a new API that lets developers implement their own compile caching, as an alternative to OptiX’s built-in disk cache.
Source: NVIDIA
On the pipeline side, OptiX 9.1 adds support for pipeline global variables, plus new pipeline options that NVIDIA says can improve control and build performance. NVIDIA is also flagging a new pipeline launch params size setting that is optional in 9.1, but is expected to become mandatory in the next major version.
NVIDIA also points to denoiser quality improvements in this release, and adds NVRTC support for cooperative vectors. Hardware support is listed as Turing and newer GPUs, which lines up with the R590 driver shift away from older architectures.
Source: NVIDIA Optix
