AMD Launches HIP-RT Ray-Tracing Library

The newest software addition under AMD's GPUOpen software umbrella is HIP-RT as a ray-tracing library for HIP.

HIP-RT is a ray-tracing library that makes it easy to write ray-tracing software against HIP and easy integration for existing HIP code-bases.

This isn't just trying to replicate existing NVIDIA RTX/OptiX interfaces or the like but is said to take a slightly different design approach, "Although there are a few other ray tracing APIs which introduce many new aspects, we designed HIP RT in a slightly different way by eliminating the need to learn many new kernel types. HIP RT introduces new object types like hiprtGeometry and hiprtScene. Once the geometric information is passed to HIP RT, the process builds the data structure, which in turn is passed to the HIP kernel. At this stage, the device-side library API can be used to perform an intersection test. Current generation graphics cards, such as AMD RDNA 2 architecture-based GPUs, support hardware ray tracing acceleration to further optimize render times. However, up until now, applications that support HIP have not been able to utilize this hardware acceleration. HIP RT is designed to allow developers to take full advantage of the Ray Accelerators used for hardware ray tracing in AMD RDNA 2 architecture-based GPUs."

HIP-RT is available on GPUOpen.com. This library has been tested on Navi 1x/2x and Vega 1x/2x class GPUs. HIP RT can also run on NVIDIA GPUs via CUDA APIs but the hardware accelerated ray-tracing only works for RDNA2 GPUs.

More details on the HIP-RT Radeon ray-tracing library via today's announcement. HIP-RT is available under an MIT license.