This section introduces the fundamental Tachyon API calls needed to initialize Tachyon, build and manage scenes, and render them.

The classic CPU-based Tachyon APIs are all defined in the tachyon.h header file, with brief comments describing them.

The GPU-accelerated Tachyon implementation built on OptiX and CUDA is written in C++, and has roughly equivalent, but differing APIs from the classic CPU-based Tachyon APIs, implementing large but incomplete subset of Tachyon's features presently, driven almost entirely by the needs of VMD, a popular molecular visualization tool.

Going forward, it is expected that the implementations of Tachyon on CPUs and GPUs will be unified and that they will add bindings for the new Khronos ANARI API, which is more modern, and better suited to hardware platform independence and ongoing API extensibility.

To be continued...

Id: rt_basics.dox,v 1.4 2022/02/19 04:12:55 johns Exp