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Ray tracing seems to be all the rage at GDC this year, so AMD has announced Radeon-Rays, an open source ray tracing SDK. From what I understand, it's basically them making a big splash over a re-named and updated AMD FireRays with Vulkan support.

Here's what they said about it:

Radeon-Rays is a GPU intersection acceleration library with basic support for heterogeneous systems. AMD developed Radeon-Rays to help developers get the most out of AMD GPUs and CPU or APUs, as well as save them from maintaining hardware-dependent code. Radeon-Rays exposes a well-defined C++ API for scene construction and performing asynchronous ray intersection queries. The current implementation is based on OpenCL, which means Radeon-Rays supports execution on all platforms conforming to the OpenCL 1.2 standard. It is not limited to AMD hardware or a specific operating system. Radeon-Rays can be easily distributed and through its API helps assure compatibility and best performance across a wide range of hardware platforms.

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It's nice to see AMD continue to put their stuff out in the open, with it not being tied to their hardware and available for anyone to use.  You can find it on GitHub with some other info available in this post on the GPUOpen site.

They also have the "Baikal initiative", an open source (MIT license) GPU-based global illumination renderer that initially started as a sample application for showing off Radeon-Rays, which has since evolved into a fully functional rendering engine.

Thanks for the tip, mirv!

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Shmerl Mar 23, 2018
What's the story with actually open OpenCL implementation for Linux?


Last edited by Shmerl on 23 March 2018 at 1:58 pm UTC
Shmerl Mar 23, 2018
Good, that should answer the hype that MS are trying to create with their lock-in.
pete910 Mar 23, 2018
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Quoting: ShmerlGood, that should answer the hype that MS are trying to create with their lock-in.

More likely in relation to Nvidia's recent RTX demos with their Volta cards.
Cmdr_Iras Mar 23, 2018
Quoting: ShmerlGood, that should answer the hype that MS are trying to create with their lock-in.

Whats Microsoft upto now? I admit I dont follow much of the goings on in windows world as I only use it for work and nothing else so have no need to hunt news about it out.
Shmerl Mar 23, 2018
Quoting: ajgpWhats Microsoft upto now?

Spreading lock-in, as usual.


Last edited by Shmerl on 23 March 2018 at 2:40 pm UTC
elbuglione Mar 23, 2018
I hope AMD shows a Linux demo soon.
Cybolic Mar 24, 2018
In the meantime, isn't Blender doing almost the same with their realtime Eevee renderer? I know Eevee is not technically a ray tracer, but isn't it pulling similar tricks?
TheRiddick Mar 24, 2018
MS and NVIDIA would be very happy if Vulkan died off, or developers steer away from it. But realistically who wants to forever be locked in to Windows10 and XBOX1 platform? at least who in their right mind would...
tuubi Mar 24, 2018
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Quoting: CybolicIn the meantime, isn't Blender doing almost the same with their realtime Eevee renderer? I know Eevee is not technically a ray tracer, but isn't it pulling similar tricks?
Any Blender users checked out AMD's ProRender yet?

Also the new, upcoming lightmapper for Unity seems to be making use of RadeonRays:
View video on youtube.com

I wonder how cross platform these technologies really are? I wouldn't be surprised if the optimization effort went mostly towards their own hardware. :)
TheRiddick Mar 24, 2018
I'd be keen to see how performance is with AMD's vs NVIDIA or Microsoft's methods. NV is claiming 2-3x performance boost over traditional shader methods, that's seems pretty crazy.

Does AMD's method require new hardware, is NV claims just because Volta has great 16FP precision (up to 125 tflops apparently at fp16).


Last edited by TheRiddick on 24 March 2018 at 10:16 am UTC
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