AMD today announced that its powerful physically-based rendering engine is becoming open source, giving developers access to the source code.

nables creators to bring ideas to life through high-performance applications and workflows enhanced by photorealistic rendering. Alongside Radeon ProRender, developers also have access to Radeon Rays on GPUOpen.com, a high-efficiency, high-performance, heterogeneous ray tracing intersection library for GPU, CPU or APU on virtually any platform. GPUOpen is an AMD initiative designed to assist developers in creating ground-breaking games, professional graphics applications and GPU computing applications with superior performance and lifelike experiences, using no-cost open development tools and software.

Radeon ProRender plugins are available today for many popular 3D content creation applications, including Autodesk® 3ds Max®, SOLIDWORKS by Dassault Systèmes and Rhino®, with Autodesk® Maya® coming soon. Radeon ProRender works across Windows®, OS X and Linux®, and supports AMD GPUs, CPUs and APUs as well as those of other vendors.

"Radeon ProRender is a high-performance, photorealistic, GPU-based rendering technology that took us years of engineering effort to create," said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. "GPU-compute based rendering solutions have the best chance of realizing the dream of photorealistic rendering for immersive computing experiences. Moving this to GPUOpen enables great graphics minds worldwide to contribute to our goal of enabling 'the art of the impossible.'"

Radeon ProRender is built on OpenCL™, allowing it to run on any hardware that supports this open standard. Unlike other renderers, Radeon ProRender can simultaneously use and balance the compute capabilities of multiple GPUs and CPUs -- on the same system, at the same time -- and deliver state-of-the-art GPU acceleration to produce rapid, accurate results. Radeon ProRender's complete, unbiased ray tracing engine includes an extensive native physically-based material and camera system. The Radeon ProRender SDK provides a C++ library that allows for easy integration into applications wherever fast, photorealistic rendering is needed. 

Availability
Radeon ProRender is slated for availability on GPUOpen in early September. GPUOpen provides a substantial library of open source, vendor-neutral graphics resources.