AMD introduces real-time ray tracing for the Prorender rendering engine

The Game Developers Conference in San Francisco is currently underway, where a clear trend is the unveiling of techniques for performing ray tracing in real time for enhanced realism in graphics engines. Now AMD is following in the footsteps of both Microsoft and Nvidia by introducing official support for hardware acceleration of ray tracing in the company’s rendering engine Prorender.

Prorender’s focus is currently on professional users, where the rendering engine is available as a plug-in for the Maya, 3ds Max, Cinema 4D and Blender software, among others. The idea is similar to other implementations to combine regular raster rendering with ray tracing, where the latter technique is used for elements such as reflections and shadows.

The purpose of hardware accelerated ray tracing in real time is primarily to speed up the work process and rendering time for developers. However, AMD does not rule out that the technology may be used in game development in the future, as Prorender is now based on the open graphics interface Vulkan.