AMD announced widened support for Radeon Rays, its GPU accelerated ray-tracing developer software.
Formerly known as AMD FireRays, Radeon Rays 2.0 is targeted at content developers who want to utilize high-performance ray-tracing capabilities with AMD GPUs, CPUs, and APUs via asynchronous compute. Unlike Nvidia’s RTX ray-tracing technology, which runs on Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing API, Radeon Rays is open source and conforms to the OpenCL 1.2 standard, so it could be deployed with non-AMD hardware and on multiple OS environments.
Whereas Nvidia seems to be poised to launch real-time ray-tracing in games within this year (despite currently limited GPU support for RTX), Radeon Rays is still very much a developer tool. However, AMD is on the same path with its new ProRender release, which now supports real-time GPU acceleration of ray-tracing techniques mixed with traditional rasterization-based rendering and is now built on the Vulkan 1.1 API, which is fully supported by GNC-based AMD GPUs with the latest Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition driver.
Radeon Rays 2.0 is available now at no cost, and developers can download the latest version of the SDK from GitHub.