AMD Makes HIP Ray Tracing Libraries Open-Source, Allowing Easier Integration Into Games & Apps
AMD has finally made its HIP Ray-Tracing library an open-source asset, allowing developers to incorporate RT capabilities into applications and leverage them.
AMD Decides To Empower Developers Through Open-Sourcing HIP RT, Now Allowing a More Efficient Use Of It
Phoronix reports that AMD has made its HIP RT library open-source to make coding on HIP-based applications much more straightforward.
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AMD's HIP (Heterogeneous-Compute Interface) is a "hybrid" API, allowing programmers to write a "universal" code executable on multiple interfaces, such as those from AMD and NVIDIA. It acts as a translation layer, allowing the use of one computing platform over the other, and it acts as a great asset in the development realm; with the open-sourcing of RT, developers are expected to benefit immensely.
While AMD hasn't disclosed the reason behind the open-sourcing of HIP RT, it may be a result of AMD's CEO, Lisa Su, fulfilling the request of an AI startup, TinyCorp, after it ran into multiple issues due to some elements of AMDGPU libraries not being open-sourced. It isn't certain whether HIP RT was a part of it, but the decision does seem to be influenced; however, regardless of that, it is great to see AMD taking specific steps to empower developers more on the platform.
This release adds the following
- Multi-level instancing
- Triangle pairing
- AS Compaction
- Optimized BVH build speed
Features
- Ray triangle intersection.
- Ray custom primitive intersection.
- Ray mask to filter geometries.
- Several bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) options.
- Load and store BVH handy for offline construction.
- BVH import.
- Motion blur.
Requirements
HIP RT runs on AMD and NVIDIA GPUs. HIP and CUDA® APIs are dynamically loaded so you do not need to have these SDKs if you have these dlls installed with the driver package. Hardware accelerated ray-tracing only works on RDNA 2 GPUs (Radeon RX 6000 series or