AMD Announces Real-Time Ray-Tracing

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The big topic at the Game Developers Conference this year is Ray-Tracing. Yesterday we covered how Microsoft is now introducing DirectX Raytracing, or GDC, and today, AMD along with GPUOpen are showing off what they have in store. AMD is announcing Radeon ProRender support for real-time ray-tracing in conjunction with its open-source Radeon Rays, which is part of the GPUOpen initiative.

Nice to see AMD is continuing the push of open-source technologies for graphics. While I still have my doubts on if this will be a reality in the near future, it is nice to see that it is finally moving forward after all these years.

AMD is announcing Radeon ProRender support for real-time GPU acceleration of ray tracing techniques mixed with traditional rasterization based rendering. This new process fuses the speed of rasterization with the physically-based realism that users of Radeon ProRender expect for their workflows. At a high level, the process achieves these results by using rasterization to draw basic structures and surfaces before a ray tracing process is used to compute advanced light-effects like reflections, shadows and transparency. The flexibility of the process allows users to decide when these advanced light effects are actually necessary and add noticeable new dimensions of realism to their renders.
 
Cool! This seems more useful in that it works with regular rasterization process to calculate lighting/shadows/transparence when needed.
 
Summary: Free, open source, works on (pretty much) every OS, Asynchronous Compute derived.

Appears to be a direct response to the WIN 10 ONLY Nvidia/MSFT solution dropped yesterday. Of course we really have no idea of performance numbers, real world application right now so lets just file this under the paper launch category and go back to souring the internet for gpu related hardware leaks. . .
 
oldmanbal said:
Summary: Free, open source, works on (pretty much) every OS, Asynchronous Compute derived.

Appears to be a direct response to the WIN 10 ONLY Nvidia/MSFT solution dropped yesterday. Of course we really have no idea of performance numbers, real world application right now so lets just file this under the paper launch category and go back to souring the internet for gpu related hardware leaks. . .
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And yet, like every other open source AMD techologies, no one will use it.
 
Stoly said:
And yet, like every other open source AMD techologies, no one will use it.
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Not true. This will be used for professionals to render projects. This is literally what every animated movie uses to render it's intricate frame by frame scenes, only scaled down to a single computer usage model. Tools like this will enable developers to start incorporating these techniques into smaller projects, enabling a new generation of designers to become familiar with Ray Tracing and its possibilities. Much like Multi-Core adoption has taken a long time to make headway into coding, now that AMD has given us more cores at lower prices, speeding up adoption, we will start to see accellerated improvements in multicore programming. This is the same for Ray tracing, it can't gain traction unless they tools are available to enable evolution.
 
noko said:
Cool! This seems more useful in that it works with regular rasterization process to calculate lighting/shadows/transparence when needed.
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So does DXR, that's how that EA demo works.

edit: I think it was Johan Andersson of the Frostbite team that said it on twitter. I saw it last night.
 
oldmanbal said:
Not true. This will be used for professionals to render projects. This is literally what every animated movie uses to render it's intricate frame by frame scenes, only scaled down to a single computer usage model. Tools like this will enable developers to start incorporating these techniques into smaller projects, enabling a new generation of designers to become familiar with Ray Tracing and its possibilities. Much like Multi-Core adoption has taken a long time to make headway into coding, now that AMD has given us more cores at lower prices, speeding up adoption, we will start to see accellerated improvements in multicore programming. This is the same for Ray tracing, it can't gain traction unless they tools are available to enable evolution.
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Sorry to bust your bubble but nvidia is an even more dominant player in the professional market (Like 85%+). No matter FirePro price/performance. Besides nvidia also has pre-visualization systems that can do real time "raytracing". Those are the ones used in SFX production houses.
 
Stoly said:
Sorry to bust your bubble but nvidia is an even more dominant player in the professional market (Like 85%+). No matter FirePro price/performance. Besides nvidia also has pre-visualization systems that can do real time "raytracing". Those are the ones used in SFX production houses.
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You would actually be very surprised how many big studios are in fact running Radeon Pros. AMD does far better in that market then the gaming world. The AMD cards do a much better job with open standards which matters if your running multiple high end rendering softwares ect. Yes NV has added support for things like opencl but its just not on the same level. AMD open compute performance is in general much better then NV which is also why they are more popular with miners. For serious studios running software like Houdine the Radeon PRO cards are the gold standard. OpenCL 2 tons of ram and better compute performance. If you can manage to get a card like the Radeon Pro SSG its performance in software like Houdini is unmatched. (AMD has moved a lot of SSG parts)
 
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oldmanbal said:
Summary: Free, open source, works on (pretty much) every OS, Asynchronous Compute derived.

Appears to be a direct response to the WIN 10 ONLY Nvidia/MSFT solution dropped yesterday. Of course we really have no idea of performance numbers, real world application right now so lets just file this under the paper launch category and go back to souring the internet for gpu related hardware leaks. . .
Click to expand...
The AMD video is actually from 2016 so it's more like, "Hey, we've been doing this for two years!" than a response to MS and NVidia.
 
oldmanbal said:
Not true. This will be used for professionals to render projects. This is literally what every animated movie uses to render it's intricate frame by frame scenes, only scaled down to a single computer usage model. Tools like this will enable developers to start incorporating these techniques into smaller projects, enabling a new generation of designers to become familiar with Ray Tracing and its possibilities. Much like Multi-Core adoption has taken a long time to make headway into coding, now that AMD has given us more cores at lower prices, speeding up adoption, we will start to see accellerated improvements in multicore programming. This is the same for Ray tracing, it can't gain traction unless they tools are available to enable evolution.
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Ray tracing for gaming will likely always be a bust. The format for the pro stuff is already set... open gl / Vulcan / opencl already do real time ray tracing and have for a while now. I really don't know what NV play is with this crap other then to try and tie game developers wanting to possibly use bits of Ray tracing for Shadows/Reflections to favor their hardware. Adding it to DX 12 smacks of desperation and something to try and perhaps excite the gaming masses that don't know better that they are adding features to DX that somehow makes it the bestest.

Pro and semi pro software that makes use of Ray Tracing like... Pixars Renderman, Houdini, Nuke, Metal ray, octane, Maya ect have implemented ray tracing in real time through opengl / opencl and in some cases now vulcan extensions for awhile now.

Ray tracing in games right now ? I'm not sure what the point is to be honest. But perhaps some developer will come up with something cool. I just don't understand why we should care though. A full ray traced game isn't happening.... and using ray tracing to improve a few reflections or something in a scene isn't something that couldn't be done with current shader routines much much faster with darn near the same end results.

IMO Ray tracing for the foreseeable future (10 years at least) is going to be in Video and still production only it is currently. Hardware and standards that can let developers mess with decent quality pre renders in real time have been around for awhile. (and AMD and the open standards rule in that regard currently). Ray Tracing doesn't really come to gaming until one of the GPU companies comes up with something completely different and new.... and even if that happens What game developer is going to spent a ton of resources building a game with a very small potential market. (its the VR paradox... can't sell tons of gear with no high end games, can't convince anyone to develop high end games without a ton of gear in the wild)

The VR paradox is why I say IF Game ray tracing is to ever really become a thing. It will be a company like PowerVR that makes it happen. Cause you need a GPU that can do something interesting out of left field. (and Imagine has already built a Ray tracing unit into their mobile GPU designs). You need a install base to pop up... so if millions of new smart phones hit the market with a Ray Tracing unit... perhaps at that point developers start using it. I know it sounds nuts... but believe it or not https://www.imgtec.com/blog/video-ray-tracing-powervr-wizard/ they have been spending R&D money on mobile ray tracing. IMO its about the only way we ever get actual real ray tracing in gaming... because the install base would have to be in place before developers really commit to features that don't work on older hardware.
 
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BloodyIron said:
Aww yeah, tasting all dem games on Linux already!
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Yeahh...off topic

bill-lumbergh.png
 
Open source as in AMD doesn't want to do the dev work, so they are outopen-sourcing the work?
 
IdiotInCharge said:
Open source as in AMD doesn't want to do the dev work, so they are outopen-sourcing the work?
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Yes, but thankfully they aren't the only one to benefit...just maybe the one who benefits most. Also, they do contribute to the projects to which they release the source code, they don't generally just dump source and run (though it has happened).
 
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