AMD Rethinks Decision And Will Open-Source Most Of Radeon Rays 4.0

Two days ago as part of the GPUOpen relaunch AMD released Radeon Rays 4.0 as their ray intersection library. Unlike the previous Radeon Rays release, however, this new Vulkan-enabled version was not open-source. But now AMD has decided that at least in large part it will be going back to open-source.

Radeon Rays 4.0 was clearly advertised as not being open-source despite the fact of being part of GPUOpen (alas there are also other closed-source projects part of GPUOpen) but sad considering previously it was open-source.

Now as a result of all the community feedback following the attention drawn to it from our earlier article, AMD quickly decided they will make Radeon Rays 4.0 open-source - at least in large part.

Dmitry Kozlov of AMD's Munich team commented, "Thanks for still being with us and for the feedback you have provided so far. It has been decided yesterday to open-source most of RadeonRays4 and put AMD specific IP in closed-source modules (source will be available upon request under SLA)."

Radeon leader Scott Herkelman also wrote yesterday on the matter, "We met internally on this today and will be making the following changes: Radeon Rays 4.0 will be made open source by AMD, but note there are some specific AMD IP's that we will need to place in libraries and we will have source code for the community for this via SLA."

Great to see the new Radeon Rays will be going open (again) at least for the majority of its code-base.