RT Virus
Overview
The rt_virus is designed to overwhelm the dedicated Ray Tracing intersection engines. It hammers the RT cores with billions of non-coherent ray-triangle tests to force continuous Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) traversal.
Requires the NVIDIA OptiX SDK (or HIP-RT on AMD)
NVIDIA's OptiX headers are proprietary and cannot be redistributed, so
official Pantheon builds skip rt_virus by default and report SKIP.
To run it on NVIDIA hardware, download the free
OptiX SDK and
point OPTIX_PATH at its include directory; the build cache picks the
change up and rebuilds automatically:
On AMD hardware, build with ENABLE_HIPRT=1 instead.
Execution Mechanics
The kernel generates a massively complex, randomized BVH in VRAM and floods the RT cores.
- Spams non-coherent ray-triangle intersection tests to defeat ray sorting optimizations.
- Forces the hardware to continuously traverse the BVH tree.
- Maxes out the specialized RT silicon block completely independently of the primary ALUs.
Target Subsystems
- Primary Target: Dedicated Ray Tracing (RT) Cores / Intersection Engines.
- Secondary Target: L1/L2 Cache (due to continuous BVH traversal).
Failure Symptoms
Critical Failures
- Rendering Artifacts: If used alongside graphical output, causes severe visual corruption and incorrect shadow/lighting calculations.
- Supplementary Thermal Overload: When run in parallel with ALU viruses, it adds enough extra wattage from the RT cores to overwhelm the cooling loop.