Radeon ProRender should soon be accessible directly inside the SolidWorks viewport
SolidWorks is the latest 3D application to be targeted by AMD with its physically-based rendering engine. The company revealed this week that Radeon ProRender (formerly previewed as AMD FireRender) will be available as a free plug-in for the popular 3D CAD tool.
Radeon ProRender should be accessible directly inside the SolidWorks viewport and supports AMD GPUs, CPUs and APUs as well as those of other vendors, including Intel and Nvidia.
SolidWorks Professional customers already have access to a mature physically-based rendering tool that can be accelerated by GPUs. However, SolidWorks Visualise only works with Nvidia GPUs (and not AMD GPUs) and is a separate application.
AMD was also keen to emphasise that Radeon ProRender is open source with prospective developers given access to the source code through GPUOpen.com, an AMD initiative designed to assist developers create professional graphics applications and GPU computing applications, as well as games.
Developers will have access to Radeon Rays, which is billed as a high-efficiency, high-performance, heterogeneous ray tracing intersection library for GPU, CPU or APU on virtually any platform.
Radeon ProRender is also available for Autodesk 3ds Max and Rhino, and works across Windows, OS X and Linux.
