What is "optix"

Nvidia OptiX (OptiX Application Acceleration Engine) is a general purpose ray tracing API for rendering, baking, collision detection, A.I. queries, etc. OptiX is not a renderer but can implement many types of renderers, it implements a modern shader-centric, stateless and bindless design. The computations are offloaded to the GPUs through either the low-level or the high-level API introduced with CUDA. CUDA is only available for Nvdia's graphics products. Nvidia OptiX is part of Nvidia GameWorks. OptiX is a high-level, or "to-the-algorithm" API, meaning that it is designed to encapsulate the entire algorithm of which ray tracing is a part, not just the ray tracing itself. This is meant to allow the OptiX engine to execute the larger algorithm with great flexibility without application-side changes.

With very few exceptions, such as Quake Wars: Ray Traced, video games use rasterization rather than ray-tracing for their rendering.

According to Nvidia, OptiX is designed to be flexible enough for "procedural definitions and hybrid rendering approaches." Aside from computer graphics rendering, OptiX also helps in optical & acoustical design, radiation and electromagnetic research, artificial intelligence queries and collision analysis.