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Welcome to the OWL Wiki - this page for now is mostly to explain how different concepts in OWL work, usually based on questions users had.

OWL is a convenience/productivity-oriented library on top of OptiX 7.x, and aims at making it easier to write OptiX programs by taking over responsibility for some of the more challenging topics like efficient host/device communication, textures, launch parameters, acceleration structure construction, multi-device rendering, etc, thus allowing the user focus on what he should be focussing on (the RTX closest-hit, any-hit, ray-gen, etc programs that implement the actual ray tracer he or she wants to write).

For an overview over what OWL is, please see this overview page of What is OWL?

Table of Contents:

• What is OWL?
• An Introduction to OWL Variables
• OWL Launch Parameters - What they are, and how to use them
• Advanced OWL Usage / OWL for Black-Belts

Other Resources:

• If you do not yet know what ray tracing is (as in "at all"): An excellent primer can be found in Pete Shirley's Ray Tracing in one Weekend series. You may also like the "Ray Tracing Essentials" series on the NVidia developers page
• If you know what ray tracing is, but have no idea what hardware accelerated ray tracing, RTX technology, or the ray tracing pipeline is, you might want to have a look at Ray Tracing Essentials/Ray Tracing Hardware and/or Ray Tracing Essentials/The Ray Tracing Pipeline
• If you want to know more about what happens behind the scenes in OWL (e.g., how acceleration structures or the shader binding table are built), there is some detailed information in our Siggraph 2019/2020 OptiX 7 Siggraph courses. Note however that the samples built in this course become much simpler if you use OWL - in fact, there is a version of this course in the OWL samples