AMD reveals Real-time Ray Tracing Support for ProRender and Radeon GPU profiler 1.2

GDC 2018 is currently underway, with “real-time ray tracing” quickly becoming the highlight of the event. Microsoft’s DXR extension to DirectX 12 has paved the way towards Ray Tracing in games, with Nvidia’s RTX technology highlighting a future where Ray Tracing can be hardware accelerated.

In contrast, AMD has not spoken in-depth about DXR yet, at least not publically, but has instead highlighted several new developer-focused features, though that doesn’t mean that they don’t have their own Ray Tracing tech to showcase. 

AMD has updated Radeon ProRender with support for real-time ray tracing, combining rasterisation with ray tracing techniques to offer a balance between speed and realism, utilising the Vulkan API to do so. This method allows the renderer to use ray tracing where it is necessary, cutting down on unneeded computational work to enable real-time ray tracing. 

This feature is designed for developers and not future games, though AMD has stated that “We’ll talk more about how the new rendering technique can enhance gaming graphics in (the) future”. This statement could mean that Real-time ray tracing could be coming to both DirectX 12 and Vulkan, which would be exciting news for both low-level APIs. 

At GDC AMD has also confirmed that they have delivered “widened support” for Radeon Rays, formerly known as FireRays, the company’s high-performance GPU-accelerated Ray Tracing software, an open source development which conforms to the OpenCL 1.2 standard. Non-AMD hardware across multiple operating systems can be supported by this tool. 

    Today at GDC, AMD announced widened support for Radeon Rays with Unity Lightmapper. Its open-source, high efficiency, high performance GPU-accelerated ray tracing software helps game developers to achieve higher visual quality and stunningly photorealistic 3D images in real-time.