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Building

Prerequisites

RXMesh supports Ubuntu, Windows, and WSL. To build the library, you will need:

  • CUDA Toolkit ≥ 11.1.0
  • A C++17-capable compiler (e.g., GCC 9+, MSVC 2019+, Clang 10+)
  • CMake ≥ 3.15
  • Git
  • An NVIDIA GPU for running the applications

If you are using WSL, ensure your distribution is correctly configured to access the GPU via WSL 2 and CUDA.

On Ubuntu, to enable visualization (via Polyscope), you may need to install OpenGL-related packages: 

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y xorg-dev libglu1-mesa-dev freeglut3-dev mesa-common-dev
This ensures that GUI-based rendering works correctly on most Ubuntu systems.

Dependencies

RXMesh relies on the following libraries:

  • OpenMesh – reference CPU implementation
  • RapidJSON – output benchmarking results
  • GoogleTest – unit testing
  • spdlog – logging and diagnostics
  • glm – small vector/matrix operations
  • Eigen – linear algebra backend
  • Polyscope – mesh visualization
  • cereal – serialization
  • METIS – mesh partitioning experiments

All dependencies are automatically downloaded and built via CMake (no manual installation needed).

Compilation

To compile RXMesh and its test/apps:

git clone https://github.com/owensgroup/RXMesh.git
cd RXMesh
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build . --config Release --parallel 8

This will build all targets, including unit tests and example applications.

To build only a specific target:

cmake --build . --target <target_name> --config Release --parallel 8

Replace <target_name> with the name of the app/test you want.

Optional CMake Flags

You can customize the build using the following CMake options:

Option Default Description
RX_USE_POLYSCOPE ON Enable Polyscope for visualization.
RX_BUILD_TESTS ON Build RXMesh unit tests.
RX_BUILD_APPS ON Build RXMesh example applications.

To disable any of these options, simply pass them to cmake when configuring:

cmake .. -DRX_USE_POLYSCOPE=OFF -DRX_BUILD_TESTS=OFF