AMD Brings Vulkan-based Ray Tracing to Blender 2.80 Add-on

[Guest_Jim_*]

Ray tracing is hardly a new technique for creating computer graphics, though it has been receiving renewed interest of late as video game technologies have gained support for it. This can enable more physically accurate rendering, by better simulating the behavior of light, and while that is nice to have in video games, in other creative scenarios it can be almost essential. Recently AMD released a beta preview of Radeon ProRender with Full Spectrum Rendering for it Blender 2.80 add-on. This add-on allows creators to have the viewport they use employ rasterization to being fully ray traced, with options in between to balance quality and speed.

Full Spectrum Rendering is based on the Radeon ProRender SDK but features a different rendering backend. By using Vulkan, fast rendering is achieved with rasterization but ray traced effects can be added onto it by leveraging the power of compute shaders and smart denoising to take better advantage of the performance of the GPU. It serves to fill the gap between OpenGL viewports and path-tracers, and does so with an all-in-one solution that is easy to enable as no manual tasks are required.

Currently this preview release is only supported on Windows 10, though Linux is supported in the SDK. While this is not something that would benefit those playing games at the moment, by bringing ray tracing effects to them, it is meant to help the artists creating the scenes in the game, by accelerating their work. Also, as it uses a single API, it should be easier to work with by reducing complexity and the potential for bugs.

 

 

Source: AMD

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