General Discussions

[cyseal]

What is the future development of Radeon Rays?

Will it have realtime raytracing and denoising library implemented like RTX?

Also, could you create Radeon Rays to be base for computational API?

Otoy's Octane and Maxon's Redshift use CUDA and are now working on support for AMD.

Could you create Radeon Rays like CUDA so that eveyone can implement it as computational API base.

[mordrac]

there are serveral ways of denoising traced rays.
Ray Tracing Denoising 

using ai is one way, but not the only one. the rtx stuff is still far to slow. i assume nvidia would need min + 300% rt cores to sufficently do one type of traced rays. lighntning or shadow or reflections.
i see it at as nvidias attempt to be the raytracing top dog and be the standard for raytracing in gaming.

and they disappointed a lot of people. rtx was to weak, to expensive and to early.

to answer your question:

rdna2 will support hardware raytracing for sure with some kind of denoising. it musnt be ai denoising.

the nvidia ai stuff is also not impressive. dlss just looks bad in my opinion. and its not much supported.

decreasing the resolution and sharpen it with radeon image sharpening looks better and is faster.

here i hope amd will put dx11 support for ris anytime soon.
you can use cas(ris port) with reshade for dx11, but a lot online game reject the use of reshade etc.

and rt its not even needed in hardware. you can take a look at the latest raytracing benchmark "neon noir" from crytek on youtube.

[cyseal]

Yes, I saw that Cryengine raytracing tested 

It seems that even without dedicated RTX architecture, CUDA alone does have computational benefits for raytracing.

That's way I asked for Radeon Rays to become similar API for AMD gpus.

[leyvin]

Radeon Rays has supported Real-Time Rendering since Release., and can relatively painlessly be optimised for usage in Game Engines.

For example the Version 2.0 (which released Oct 2018) was drastically improved in terms of it's performance., over Version 1.0 ... so like-for-like you could process up to 64 Iterations at the same speed as 25 Iterations (4 Rays Per Iteration)., but it also added additional elements such-as more pipeline feature enable / disable to tailor solutions and see even more performance improvement.

They also began to ship a De-Noising Engine with it., which supports a few techniques... including Machine Intelligence (Deep Learning as NVIDIA calls it) but also some Just-in-Time Solutions as well. 

At present it is integrated (in Beta) with Unreal Engine 4., for usage with either Desktop or VR Pipelines. 

In terms of Creation Tools., it's available for:

Blender

Maya

3D Max

Modo

Solidworks

PRT CREO

and USD Hydra

It has been available (from Release back in Early 2016) as an Open Source API. 

It also uses the Industry Standard OpenCL 1.2., but can be fairly painlessly ported to OpenCL 2.x or DirectCompute 5.x as these are relatively similar.

CUDA can also now be relatively easily converted to OpenCL 1.2 / 2.0 via HIPFY., also open source and available on the GPU Open Site (well GitHub, but it's easier to see updates and get the links from GPUOpen.com) 

While Radeon Rays / ProRender haven't been updated in about a Year (directly) it should be noted that AMD have quite often been expanding the supported Tools; as well as various changes to provide better Game Engine Integration during said time. 

It's also a very stable and feature rich code base... so there isn't really any need for them to keep releasing new updates; what they need really is more widespread integration and adoption; something they can't really do on their own.

With this said, there might be an update in the non-to-distant future; given that the recent CryEngine 5 Demo which features RTR is based upon Radeon Rays / ProRender Technology ... it's a slightly different approach (it's not that different from how Snowdrop works) but still; is what I'd argue will be the actual direction and adoption that will become more commonplace for Engine Rendering... while things like DXR will remain much more sensible for things like Physics and AI. 

[cyseal]

I wonder if Radeon Rays can be used for raytracing in Unity ?

It only works on Nvidia GPUs.

I would like Radeon rays to become API like RTX and CUDA  to use in Unity and Unreal  for realtime raytraced lighting.

Getting started with ray tracing | High Definition RP | 7.1.5 

GitHub - Unity-Technologies/SmallOfficeRayTracing: This repository contains a startup DXR project. 

Real-Time Ray Tracing | Unreal Engine Documentation 

[leyvin]

It's of course possible to create a Radeon Rays Plug-In for Unity … and I'd be surprised if one doesn't exist somewhere.

With this said., I'm not surprised that they're currently working on DXR Support as after all that is a Feature of DirectX 12 (which they're finally getting around to implementing).

Yes, for the moment DXR only works "Natively" with RTX Hardware., but this has a lot to do with AMD's stance that until they have a complete Hardware Range Capable of Supporting Real-Time Ray Tracing... they're not going to support DXR.

It isn't a lack of Capability in the Hardware., as any GCN / RDNA Hardware is physically capable of Hardware Accelerated Ray-Tracing (or Path Tracing)

I'd argue this is a healthy approach to take.

I can't speak for Unreal Engine 4 (as I refuse to support it out of principal, their partnership with NVIDIA continues to hold them back) but I will definitely look into a Radeon Rays for Unity integration over the next few days. 

Could be a fun little side-project.

[cyseal]

Radeon Rays are already integrated in Unity for lightmapping but not for raytracing.

[cyseal]

Redshift is also working to support for AMD. This is another reason that AMD should create OpenCL and Radeon Rays as CUDA alternative API.

I don't know how soon will Redshift do this.

FAQ | GPU-accelerated 3D rendering software | Redshift 

• Does Redshift support AMD GPUs?

  Not currently. Redshift currently only supports CUDA-compatible NVidia GPUs. Support for other GPU platforms (such as AMD GPUs) is planned for the future.

[cyseal]

Another reason to build future RadeonRays, OpenCl environment like RTX

3D History in the Baking: NVIDIA RTX Accelerates Texture Design Tools in Substance Painter | NVIDIA ... 

RTX GPU can bake maps up to 8x faster than before.

I think AMD should wok on improving heavy computational tasks in art design like building light in Unreal and Unity, baking textures.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Nikie-Monteleone-SP-baking.mp4