Minor Release - Upgrade to OptiX 6.5.0

Enhancements

• Upgraded to OptiX 6.5.0.
  • The main improvement that comes with this is that the denoiser is now in the driver which means that this package is now significantly slimmer in size. Around a whopping 370MB slimmer in fact, which means this tool is now only 19.4MB (5.86MB compressed) in size!
  • See https://developer.nvidia.com/optix for full list of changes.

IMPORTANT - This release now has a minimum Nvidia driver requirement of 436.02

Minor Release - Profiling and bug fixes

Enhancements

• Minor profiling stats - The denoiser will now print in seconds how long the denoiser took to execute. Along with this a new -repeat flag has been added to the command line parameters so that you can repeat the execution N times. This is useful to get accurate stats on the performance of the denoiser.

Bug fixes

• Merged a fix by @Talkless which fixed the slicing of exceptions. OptiX error messages should now print correctly. #12
• Added a work around for an issue that was causing the denoiser not to exit on windows 7. This work around was provided by @comsyspro #13

Thanks for your contributions guys!

Minor Release - Upgrade to OptiX 6.0.0 and add maxmem option

It is finally time to get this release out now that the new OptiX is out! This release includes,

• Upgraded to OptiX 6.0.0.
  • Less DLLs to ship
  • Turing architecture (RTX) support.
  • See https://developer.nvidia.com/optix for full list of changes.
• Added a -maxmem command line flag for setting a maximum memory limit in MB for the denoiser to use.
  • From the OptiX programming guide - "The denoiser will try to stay below the defined size by splitting the image to be denoised into tiles and denoising them individually. If the defined memory size does not allow denoising, the denoising operation will fail and leave the image in its original state. However, setting a maximum memory size may result in slower denoising performance.".
• Fixed a bug where feature AOVs would be read incorrectly if they were a different format to the beauty AOV #10 - thanks @jackyjacky1307 for finding this bug and the solution to this.

IMPORTANT - As with the upgrade to OptiX 6.0.0 you will now require an Nvidia driver of at least 418.xx or higher and an Nvidia GPU of Maxwell architecture (Geforce 700 series) or higher.

Minor Release - Improved HDR Denoising

So apparently there is a "semi-secret" option to enable the use of HDR training data documented on the online OptiX documentation and not the published documentation that comes with the OptiX distribution. Don't I have egg on my face! In this version I've added an option "-hdr" to enable or disable the use of this. It is enabled by default. As you can see below on the test image the the results with the new training data seems to improve the denoised result!

HDR training data disabled:

HDR training data enabled:

Major Release - OpenImageIO and OptiX 5.1

I am happy to announce the projects first major release with what I consider are some pretty nice features. In this release,

• OpenImageIO
  • DevIL seemed to be causing a lot of problems and didn't support EXRs. Therefore I have replaced DevIL with the much more robust and widely adopted OpenImageIO. With this comes vast support for many image formats including EXRs. Many thanks to DominikPott for the help on this.
• Upgraded to OptiX 5.1
  • Today Nvidia released OptiX 5.1 which ships with their new HDR version of the OptiX denoiser which no longer clamps the range when denoising unlike previous versions.

Minor release - Optix 5.0.1 and Error checking

Just a minor release before I get time to tackle replacing DevIL with OIIO and adding support for other platforms. In this release,

• Updated to OptiX 5.0.1. This fixes some bugs with the denoiser including a crash when trying to denoise an image smaller than 90x90.
• Added some error checking for the DevIL library to remove some ambiguity for when images fail to load.
• Catch OptiX exceptions so if OptiX fails for some reason you will no longer crash.