fakeOwl
A CPU implementation of OWL. Very experimental :-)
The CPU intersections are computed using the Visionaray submodule, but honestly intersections are less than 1% of this library. We could probably use Embree here w/o much effort, but I'm using Visionaray b/c it comes with a nice texture abstraction layer, and I'm also more familiar with Visionaray than with Embree, so I never bothered to replace it so far.
I'm currently only supporting a subset of OWL and adding features only as needed for my own projects. Also note that OWL CPU programs are pretty slow due to certain conceptual limitations (mostly function call overhead and costly access to TLS). So it's mostly useful for debugging etc.
The following changes are necessary to an existing code base at the very least:
Replace owlXXXBufferCreate() with owlBufferCreateEXT() from owl_ext.h (uses malloc/free instead of cudaMalloc et al.).
The device code should mostly just work. See the comments on CUDA below, and it might be necessary to shuffle some headers around in case that declarations are slightly different than in real OptiX. In your "device code":
CMake is a bit different of course. You have to link with libfakeOwl.{a|dylib} and you want to check out the macro fake_owl_compile_and_embed in cmake/configure_fake_owl.cmake. With my cmake version (3.19.1) that macro would fail if being passed .cu files, therefore I'm renaming the files where the optix device programs would usually go to .cpp (another option would be to use symlinks).
That's mostly it. Some platform-specific CUDA stuff works, but most (obviously) doesn't. Have a look in the fake/cuda.h and fake/optix.h files. The OptiX functions should eventually be ported in their entirety but the CUDA stuff is only there for convenience. BTW, there is a clock64() implementation in fake/cuda.h that you should use instead of clock() on x86, as the latter will perform syscalls and is awfully slow (some of the owl samples use clock()).
fakeOwl is based off of stable OWL releases; the basis for new fakeOwl versions form the public header files under include/owl/. The current fakeOwl version is based on the commit 8c4d5f1ea0cc2a1974ed8111381c1d26e6417af8 (OWL master as of Tue Apr 18 13:37:02 2023 -0600). See fake/verision.h for details.
MIT if not noted otherwise. I'm including lot's of code that was directly copied from OWL, the license there is Apache 2.