Building

Lighthouse 2 should compile and run out-of-the-box, in theory. In practice, 'it works on my machine'.

The most common problem with building Lighthouse 2 is CUDA. Lighthouse 2 uses CUDA 11.7, which must be installed on your system. You can find CUDA 11.7 here: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads . You don't have to download the Optix library; this is included with the Lighthouse 2 download.

Running

To start Lighthouse 2, tag one of the applications (e.g., imguiapp, app_matui or tinyapp) as Startup Project (right-click tinyapp, 'Set as Startup Project'). Then press F5 (or via the menu: Debug->Start Debugging) to build and run the application.

If the application crashes, check the following:

• You need quite fresh drivers for the Optix / CUDA cores. Update your drivers if you didn't do so very recently.
• Lighthouse 2 assumes a Maxwell-class GPU or later (Pascal, Volta, Turing). If your device is older, for now the only option is the software rasterizer. It may be possible to get Lighthouse 2 to run on your device; if this is relevant to you please let me know.
• If you are running on a laptop, chances are that by default the 'integrated GPU' is used, instead of the NVIDIA GPU. You can change this in the NVIDIA control panel, either globally (not recommended) or for specific applications.

If you find any other problems, please create an issue on Github.