AMD's Radeon ProRender SDK 3.1 Has Been Released
The update brings bevel shader support, light linking, updates to Viewport Renderer, and more.
AMD has launched Radeon ProRender SDK 3.1.0, an enhanced version of the company's free physically-based GPU rendering engine, bringing tons of new features and improvements to the renderer, including bevel shader support, light linking, two new AOVs, updates to Viewport Renderer, and support for older GPU architectures.
The highlight of the update is the newly-added functionality that enables one to apply roundness as a shader node to the edge of geometry. Providing an example image, which you can see attached above, the company states that the new feature will help users to add more realism without extra polygons.
Another notable feature added with the update is Light Linking, which makes an explicit pair of geometry and light where the light illuminates against only the paired geometry, allowing for more flexible and controllable NPR workflows.
Moreover, the 3.1 version comes with two new AOVs – Volume AOV and SSS AOV – that capture heterogeneous volume and subsurface scattering respectively, which can then be used for compositing and denoising.
ProRender's Viewport Renderer also got a couple of cool new features, the first one being an improved light sampling strategy to accelerate the viewport rendering in Hybrid Pro. Based on a tree data structure, the new strategy reduces rendering noise and accelerates the process. Additionally, the team implemented Spatiotemporal Reservoir Resampling (ReSTIR) and Spatiotemporal Variance-Guided Filtering (SVGF) techniques, further improving the convergence of viewport rendering using Hybrid Pro
Furthermore, the team added a new displacement mapping feature to Hybrid Pro, which doesn't do tessellation, skipping the lengthy pre-tessellation steps that are usually required before rendering the displaced geometry.
Other upgrades include the added support for older GPU architectures, which do not support hardware ray tracing, and the transition of ProRender from OpenCL to the Heterogeneous Interface for Portability (HIP), meaning that all of the software's rendering kernels are now pre-compiled instead of having to be compiled at runtime.
You can read the full announcement here. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform, our Reddit page, and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.
