Maxon, the developers of professional software solutions for editors, filmmakers, motion designers and visual effects artists, recently announced that artists can now use select AMD Radeon PRO graphics cards to create photorealistic images with its production-class Redshift render engine. Redshift now offers high-performance rendering via AMD (HIP), Apple (Metal) and Nvidia (CUDA) technologies, while anyone can work with Redshift materials and render with the Redshift CPU announced in the month of April.
“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. This development brings us even closer to that achievement and also satisfies one of the community’s most desired feature requests,” said Maxon CEO David McGavran.
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 that allows easy migration from existing CUDA code. This means that developers can write their GPU applications and, with very minimal changes, be able to 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, opening possibilities for individuals or studios with a variety of hardware setups – whether it is Nvidia on one machine, AMD on another, or CPU only.
To run Redshift on the supported AMD Radeon PRO W6800 graphics card will require the AMD Software: PRO Edition 22.Q1 driver available from the AMD website later this quarter. Redshift is also validated on the AMD Radeon PRO VII graphics card. As per the Maxon announcement, 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.