NVIDIA OptiX™ Legacy Downloads

This page provides downloads for all previous versions of OptiX SDK

By clicking the "Agree & Download" button below, you are confirming that you have read and agree to be bound by the SOFTWARE DEVELOPER KITS, SAMPLES AND TOOLS LICENSE AGREEMENT for use of the SDK package. The download will begin immediately after clicking on the "Agree & Download" button below.

Download OptiX™ SDK 9.0.0 - (Windows, Linux, Arm)

Release Notes (444KB, PDF)

NOTE: Requires NVIDIA R570 driver or newer. You may need a Beta Driver for certain operating systems.

Release Highlights NVIDIA® OptiX™ 9.0.0 (February 2025)

• Clusters a.k.a. Megageometry - API for dramatically accelerating BVH builds of massive dynamic triangle meshes
• Cooperative Vectors - API for executing small AI networks within OptiX shader programs, accelerated by NVIDIA Tensor Cores
• Hardware-accelerated linear curves on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, plus a new, faster software curve intersector called Rocaps
• Denoiser quality improvements
• See the Release

Download OptiX™ SDK 8.1.0 - (Windows, Linux, Arm)

Release Notes (90KB, PDF)

NOTE: Requires NVIDIA R555 driver or newer. You may need a Beta Driver for certain operating systems.
OptiX 8.0.0 introduces performance improvements and support for Shader Execution Reordering (SER)

Release Highlights NVIDIA® OptiX™ 8.1.0 (October 2024)

• Memory improvements for instance acceleration structures
• Additional device-side functions for geometry acceleration structures
• Denoiser quality improvements
• Support for multiple versions of OptiX within the same executable
• Some OptiX API functions are being deprecated. Please see the Release Notes for details.

Download OptiX™ SDK 8.0.0 - (Windows, Linux)

Release Notes (90KB, PDF)

[DEVBLOG] - How to get started with OptiX 7.3 DevBlog or GTC Session

NOTE: Requires NVIDIA R535 driver or newer. You may need a Beta Driver for certain operating systems.
OptiX 8.0.0 introduces performance improvements and support for Shader Execution Reordering (SER)

Release Highlights NVIDIA® OptiX™ 8.0.0 (Aug 2023)

• Shader Execution Reordering (SER)
• Improved ribbon intersector that produces smoother segment connections
• SDK sample optixPathTracer has been updated to support SER feature
• The OptiX Demand Loading library is now fully asynchronous, with sparse texture tiles loaded in the background by
  multiple CPU threads while OptiX kernels execute on the GPU

Download OptiX™ SDK 7.7 - (Windows, Linux and ARM)

Release Notes (90KB, PDF)

[DEVBLOG] - How to get started with OptiX 7 DevBlog

NOTE: Requires NVIDIA 530.41 driver or newer.

Release Highlights NVIDIA® OptiX™ 7.7 (March 2023)

The OptiX 7.7 adds support for Displacement Micromaps (DMMs) that provide hardware accelerated displacement for triangle mesh geometry. DMMs are supported on GPUs with RTCores and accelerated in hardware on the new Ada Lovelace generation of GPUs. Cubic curves can now be specified with a Bezier basis, and we introduce support for quadratic B-Spline ribbons (curves with a flat cross-section). The denoiser now supports temporal denoising in conjunction with 2x upscaling.

Download OptiX™ SDK 7.6 - (Windows, Linux)

Release Notes (90KB, PDF)

[DEVBLOG] - How to get started with OptiX 7 DevBlog

NOTE: Requires NVIDIA 522.25 driver or newer.

Release Highlights NVIDIA® OptiX™ 7.6 (October 2022)

The OptiX 7.6 SDK adds support for Opacity Micromaps (OMMs) which provide hardware accelerated alpha mask checks for triangle mesh geometry. OptiX 7.6 OMMs leverage the new Ada Lovelace generation of GPUs to provide hardware acceleration of OMMs, while previous generations are supported through an optimized software implementation.

Download OptiX™ SDK 7.5 - (Windows, Linux and ARM)

Release Notes (90KB, PDF)

[DEVBLOG] - How to get started with OptiX 7 DevBlog

NOTE: Requires NVIDIA 515.48 driver or newer.

Release Highlights NVIDIA® OptiX™ 7.5 (June 2022)

• AI Upscaling in the Denoiser
• BVH Viewer support in Nsight
• Symbolic Debugging Support
• A new Sphere primitive
• An update to our Demand Loading Library

Download OptiX™ SDK 7.4.0 - (Windows, Linux and ARM)

Release Notes (90KB, PDF)

[DEVBLOG] - How to get started with OptiX 7 DevBlog

NOTE: Requires NVIDIA R495.89 driver or newer. You may need a Beta Driver for certain operating systems..

OptiX 7.4 includes support for parallel compilation, temporal denoising of arbitrary values, improvements to the demand loading library, enhancements to ray paloads, Catmull-Rom curves, and decreased memory for curves.

Release Highlights NVIDIA® OptiX™ 7.4 (Nov 2021)

• Parallel compilation
• Temporal denoising of arbitrary values
• Improvements to the demand loading library
• Enhancements to ray payloads
• Catmull-Rom curves
• Improved memory usage with the OptiX curve primitive

Download OptiX™ SDK 7.3.0 - (Windows, Linux and Arm)

Release Notes (119KB, PDF)

[DEVBLOG] - How to get started with OptiX 7 DevBlog

NOTE: Requires NVIDIA R465.84 driver or newer. You may need a Beta Driver for certain operating systems..

OptiX 7.3 introduces performance improvements, new denoiser modes and asynchronous processing in the OptiX demand loading library.

Release Highlights NVIDIA® OptiX™ 7.3 (Apr 2021)

• Added support for temporal denoising
• Improved performance of the OptiX Curves primitive
• The OptiX Demand Loading library is now fully asynchronous, with sparse texture tiles loaded in the background by multiple CPU threads while OptiX kernels execute on the GPU

Download OptiX™ SDK 7.2.0 - (Windows and Linux)

Release Notes (119KB, PDF)

[DEVBLOG] - How to get started with OptiX 7 DevBlog

NOTE: Requires NVIDIA R456.71 driver or newer for Windows and 455.28 or newer for Linux..

OptiX 7.2.0 introduces: support for module specializations for runtime feature toggles, Arbitrary Output Variable (AOV) denoising for increased flexibility, improved error checking and debugging for an enhanced developer experience, as well as source libraries and sample code to support demand loading of rendering data.

Release Highlights NVIDIA® OptiX™ 7.2.0 (Oct 2020)

• Specialization is a powerful new feature that allows renderers to maintain generality while increasing performance on specific use cases. The OptiX compiler is leveraged to fold constant values and elide complex code that is not required by a particular scene setup.
• OptiX 7.2 adds the ability to denoise multiple AOV layers simultaneously along with the color image in a single denoising pass.
• Validation mode, when turned on, enables extra safety checks when starting or debugging an OptiX application. For example, it enables debug exceptions automatically, and checks the CUDA stream status for every API call.
• Demand loading source library enables textures to be loaded on demand, which greatly reduces memory requirements, start-up time, and disk I/O compared to preloading textures.

Download OptiX™ SDK 7.1 - (Windows and Linux)

Release Notes (119KB, PDF)

[DEVBLOG] - How to get started with OptiX 7 DevBlog

NOTE: Requires NVIDIA R450 driver or newer. You may need a Beta Driver for certain operating systems.

OptiX 7.1.0 includes support for curve primitives, improved denoising, upgraded debugging utilities, performance improvements and bug fixes.

Release Highlights NVIDIA® OptiX™ 7.1.0 (June 2020)

• Added curves as a new type of geometric primitive
• Denoiser improvements
• Increase instancing limits
• Several new device exceptions were added to catch common errors
• Fixed support in optix headers for cuda runtime compilation using nvrtc
• Enable compaction support for acceleration structures on non-RTX GPUs
• OptiX will attempt to reset a corrupted compile disk cache
• Improved timeline markings in Nsight Compute
• Fixed a crash on non-RTX GPUs when rendering with a refit IAS
• Six new SDK samples.

Download OptiX™ SDK 7.0 - (Windows and Linux)

Release Notes (90KB, PDF)

NOTE: Requires NVIDIA R435.80 driver or newer. You may need a Beta Driver for certain operating systems.

OptiX 7 introduces a new low-level CUDA-centric API giving application developers direct control of memory, compilation, and launches while maintaining the programming model and shader types. It also includes a library that provides helper functions to load textures on demand.

Release Highlights NVIDIA® OptiX™ 7.0.0 (Aug 2019)

• No host state is maintained. Scene graphs, materials, etc., are managed by the application rather than by OptiX
• GPU memory is managed by the application using CUDA. (No OptiX buffers or variables)
• GPU launches are explicit and asynchronous using CUDA streams
• Shader compilation is explicit (Similar to DXR or Vulkan)
• All host functions are thread-safe
• Source code for demand loading library is included and designed for direct inclusion in production applications
• Multi-GPU operation is managed by the application
• OptiX AI denoiser no longer requires redistribution of cuDNN (included in the driver)
• New disk caching features offer flexibility for production environments
• Improved PTX handling (extended instruction set)
• Improved build times (3x to 4x faster on average)
• Hit shaders can access triangle vertex data, motion blur data, and the transformation stack
• Nsight Compute 2019.4 & NsightVSE 2019.3 Debugger OptiX application profiling support [Coming Soon]
  • OptiX RTCore modules are identified
  • All public OptiX module and Application/User kernels called by OptiX are visible
  • NsightVSE can set breakpoints, inspect GPU state, and debug with expected run control through application code