Joint development effort with AMD uses the AMD HIP Framework to migrate code from Nvidia CUDA
Redshift, the GPU-accelerated biased renderer from Maxon that works with Cinema 4D, Maya, 3ds max, Blender, Vectorworks, Archicad and others, can now be accelerated by AMD Radeon Pro GPUs.
The production-class render engine now offers photorealistic rendering via AMD (HIP), Apple (Metal) and Nvidia (CUDA) technologies, while anyone can work with Redshift materials and rendering through Redshift CPU.
The AMD dedicated GPU programming environment – Heterogeneous Interface for Portability (HIP) – is designed for programming high performance kernels on GPU hardware.
HIP is a C++ runtime API and programming language designed to support easy migration from existing CUDA code. According to Maxon, this means developers can write their GPU applications and, with very minimal changes, run their code in any environment with comparable performance across platforms.
Redshift also supports rendering with mixed devices like RS CPU and AMD Radeon Pro graphics cards, so firms can work with a variety of hardware setups – whether it is Nvidia on one machine, AMD on another, or CPU only.
“Our ultimate goal is Redshift Everywhere, in the hands of every artist on every DCC application, with the ability to take advantage of all the capabilities of their hardware,” said Maxon CEO David McGavran, before adding, “This development brings us even closer to that achievement and also satisfies one of the community’s most desired feature requests.”
To run Redshift on the supported AMD Radeon Pro W6800 graphics card will require the AMD Software: Pro Edition 22.Q1 driver which is slated to be available later this quarter. Redshift is also validated on the AMD Radeon Pro VII graphics card.
Both AMD Software and Redshift support for AMD Radeon Pro graphics cards on Windows are currently in a closed technology preview and development is actively ongoing.
