AMD Finally Opens Up Its Radeon Raytracing Analyzer "RRA" Source Code

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Finally Opens Up Its Radeon Raytracing Analyzer "RRA" Source Code

This summer AMD announced the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer "RRA" as part of their developer software suite for helping to profile ray-tracing performance/issues on Windows and Linux with both Direct3D 12 and the Vulkan API. Initially the RRA 1.0 release was binary-only but now AMD has made good on their "GPUOpen" approach and made it open-source...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GPUOpen-RRA-Open-Source

[Danny3]

Good!
Hopefully in 100 years they will open the Windows driver too so that someone can implement all those cool things int he Linux driver too and then create a GUI for it.

[mbriar]

Good!
Hopefully in 100 years they will open the Windows driver too so that someone can implement all those cool things int he Linux driver too and then create a GUI for it.

I don't know which cool things you are talking about, but RRA is already supported by RADV.

[schmidtbag]

Good!
Hopefully in 100 years they will open the Windows driver too so that someone can implement all those cool things int he Linux driver too and then create a GUI for it.

Honestly, I'd rather not have that. The Windows driver is a mess. AMD's Mesa devs along with other contributors like Valve are making a much more polished driver and are catching up pretty fast. They're pretty much fully up-to-spec with OpenGL, the performance is very well optimized, and they're most of the way there with Vulkan. They're running out of things to implement and improve, which is probably why they're so quick to get new models fairly functional on release day. I predict in another 2 years, AMD will be just about fully caught up in feature parity with Windows, at least for RDNA+ GPUs.

[tildearrow]

They shouldn't call it GPUOpen if they offer closed-source as well...

[vegabook]

Nvidia spankin' AMD like a red-headed stepchild on ray tracing hardware and no amount of open source praying is going to make that reality go away.

[Luke_Wolf]

Nvidia spankin' AMD like a red-headed stepchild on ray tracing hardware and no amount of open source praying is going to make that reality go away.

You mean the reality that Ray Tracing Hardware won't be really suitable for RTRT for another oh probably 5 years and that the most it's really used for at the moment is some fairly minimal effects that you won't notice unless you're paying really close attention but will tank your frames to the point where you need to render at a much lower resolution and upscale it in order to get anything approximating reasonable FPS? That reality?

[Linuxxx]

You mean the reality that Ray Tracing Hardware won't be really suitable for RTRT for another oh probably 5 years and that the most it's really used for at the moment is some fairly minimal effects that you won't notice unless you're paying really close attention but will tank your frames to the point where you need to render at a much lower resolution and upscale it in order to get anything approximating reasonable FPS? That reality?

No, the reality that all major VFX & animation studios are running on Linux since around two decades, and nVidia still being the only viable option on those systems to this very day.

The addition of RTRT acceleration hardware to GPUs is mainly driven by these professional markets, with the retail consumer market profiting from this evolution as a by-product, which is why ray-tracing in games is still an afterthought, because it's not the main driving factor behind this particular technology.

AMD unfortunately has totally missed the train in the professional market, which is why nVidia can still get away with their vendor lock-in tactics.

Just to put this into perspective, here's where the professional market already has been at in 2013:

Pixar's Fast Lighting Preview with NVIDIA Technology

At SIGGRAPH 2013, Pixar describes how they achieve fast interactive lighting preview using NVIDIA® OptiX™ Technology and GPUs in a Katana-based production pipeline. Jean-Daniel Nahmias, technical director at Pixar, showcases this pipeline using full product shots and assets from Monster's University.

[Luke_Wolf]

No, the reality that all major VFX & animation studios are running on Linux since around two decades, and nVidia still being the only viable option on those systems to this very day.

The addition of RTRT acceleration hardware to GPUs is mainly driven by these professional markets, with the retail consumer market profiting from this evolution as a by-product, which is why ray-tracing in games is still an afterthought, because it's not the main driving factor behind this particular technology.

AMD unfortunately has totally missed the train in the professional market, which is why nVidia can still get away with their vendor lock-in tactics.

Just to put this into perspective, here's where the professional market already has been at in 2013:

Here's a clue: Movies don't use Real Time Ray Tracing (RTRT) which is the reason there's a specification in terms in the first place, otherwise everyone would just call it wait for it... Ray Tracing. Literally the first movie to use Real Time Ray Tracing only came out this year https://petapixel.com/2022/09/19/aus...in-production/

[BreachScrambler]

Here's a clue: Movies don't use Real Time Ray Tracing (RTRT) which is the reason there's a specification in terms in the first place, otherwise everyone would just call it wait for it... Ray Tracing. Literally the first movie to use Real Time Ray Tracing only came out this year https://petapixel.com/2022/09/19/aus...in-production/

Regular, non-real-time ray tracing still benefits from being hardware accelerated. Phoronix did a Blender benchmark just a few months ago and it was an absolute slaughterfest for the green team.