The company already announced support for Vulkan

Mar 21, 2018 10:25 GMT  ·  By

Following Microsoft’s announcement regarding the addition of a new technique to DirectX 12 called Ray-tracing, both AMD and Nvidia made statements regarding the future of this technology. 

One of the surprises from GDC 2018 (Game Developers Conference) in San Francisco was Microsoft’s announcement regarding the introduction of a new rendering technique in DirectX 12 called Ray-tracing, which should help developers significantly boost the visuals in games and other 3D rendered environments.

Ray-tracing is described as the only possible way of rendering photorealistic images, which is something like the Holy Grail for developers. It might seem that it’s far into the future, but Microsoft’s announcement regarding the implementation of Ray-tracing into DirectX 12 is the first step to reach that goal.

Who’s ready?

As you can imagine, it’s not enough for Microsoft to update DirectX 12 with new capabilities. GPU makers also have to be ready with proper APIs to make sure that they can render it properly. And while Nvidia was quick to add that RTX, an implementation that will power all ray-tracing APIs supported by NVIDIA on Volta and future GPUs, the AMD camp remained silent, until now.

It turns out that they are actually already working on it, and they are cooperating with Microsoft for the best possible implementation.

Scott Wasson, Senior Product Manager of Software at AMD noted that “AMD is collaborating with Microsoft to help define, refine and support the future of DirectX12 and ray tracing. AMD remains at the forefront of new programming model and application programming interface (API) innovation based on a forward-looking, system-level foundation for graphics programming. We’re looking forward to discussing with game developers their ideas and feedback related to PC-based ray tracing techniques for image quality, effects opportunities, and performance.”

AMD has a ton of presentations at GDC, many of which are related to Vulkan, but they also have one that’s called “Real-Time Ray-Tracing Techniques for Integration into Existing Renderers.”

The company announced the real-time ray-tracing Support for ProRender and Radeon GPU Profiler 1.2, so it looks like the company will be ready for the new technology as well. The only difference is that the ray-tracing from AMD is built for Vulkan and not DirectX 12, but we’ll know more after their presentations at GDC 2018.