At Unite Berlin 2018, AMD’s Senior Software Engineer Guillaume Boisse showcase ways via which developers can add real-time ray tracing effects with Radeon ProRender and Radeon Rays. Radeon ProRender and Radeon Rays are AMD’s solutions to real-time ray tracing, similar to what NVIDIA offers with its RTX technology.
Radeon ProRender is a complete GPU-based renderer that handles pretty much everything (like ray casting and shading), is a physically-based renderer that outputs rendered images and targets mainly content creators but is also available for developers. On the other hand, Radeon Rays comes with a smaller feature-set, is only a ray intersection library and is cross-platform.
What this means is that game developers will be using the Radeon Rays for their real-time ray tracing solutions in games, using hybrid rendering. Hybrid rendering will combine ray tracing with rasterization. Rasterization will be used for primary visibility and lighting whereas ray tracing will be used for secondary and complex effects.
In this Hybrid mode, real-time ray tracing will be used for Ambient Occlusion, Glossy Reflections, Diffuse Global Illumination and Area Lighting. These effects will be handled by Radeon Rays and can be turned on/off based on hardware capabilities.
Radeon Rays is currently available for download on GPUOpen and its future versions will support the Vulkan API.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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