NVIDIA has announced that it has launched the world's first interactive ray tracing engine. The new engine will join the NVIDIA line of application acceleration engines. The application acceleration engines were unveiled at SIGGRAPH 2009 and include the NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine, SceniX engine, CompleX engine, and PhysX engine.

The new OptiX ray tracing engine is a programmable ray tracing pipeline that promises to allow software developers to bring new realism to applications using the C programming language. The engine uses the massively parallel power of NVIDIA Quadro processors.

"In one year, NVIDIA has gone from proving interactive GPU ray tracing is possible, to making it available to all," said Jon Peddie, founder and president of Jon Peddie Research. "Intricate design tasks, such as examining the play of reflection and refraction across surfaces and within glass, can now be examined in real-time by utilizing the OptiX acceleration engine running on Quadro processors. This is a phenomenal milestone for developers and designers alike."