Radeon ProRender SDK 3.1 Released - Finishes Transition From OpenCL To HIP

AMD today published Radeon ProRender SDK 3.1 as the newest version of this cross-platform and open-source physically-based rendering engine.

After years of work, AMD with ProRender SDK 3.1 has transitioned this rendering engine from relying on OpenCL to now the HIP interface. ProRender with HIP has been available as a preview/test candidate for the past year while with ProRender SDK 3.1, the back-end of ProRender has now switched to HIP from OpenCL on both Windows and Linux. This HIP support makes use of the Orochi project for loading HIP and CUDA APIs dynamically.

ProRender SDK 3.1 with this HIP/Orochi usage also now allows for all kernels to be pre-compiled. ProRender SDK 3.1 also adds bevel shader support, Volume and SSS AOVs, light linking, and other rendering improvements.

On the hardware side, ProRender SDK 3.1 with its Hybrid Pro code has extended Radeon GPU support to include older AMD GPUs without hardware ray-tracing. ProRender's HybridPro now includes Navi 1x, Vega, and Polaris among the extended GPU architectures.

More details on the ProRender SDK 3.1 release via GPUopen.com while the SDK can be downloaded from GitHub.