AMD Makes HIP Ray Tracing Libraries Open-Source, Allowing Easier Integration Into Games & Apps

15.03.2024 - 20:53 / wccftech.com / Lisa Su / Muhammad Zuhair

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 newer).

The supported AMD GPU architecture families are:

• Navi3x (Radeon RX 7000 series).
• Navi2x (Radeon RX 6000 series).
• Navi1x (Radeon RX 5000 series).

You can download the open-source HIP RT libraries from GPUOpen.com since that is where AMD made the announcement.

News Source: Phoronix