Yet more exciting updates for game developers here on GPUOpen

April may be coming to an end, but we’re not finished releasing shiny new content on GPUOpen!

Last week, we were proud to support Microsoft® with their fantastic Game Stack Live virtual event, including the news that select FidelityFX will now be available for the Xbox GDK.

We also gave two technical talks, and to support them we released our new AMD Ryzen™ CPU Software Performance Guide, and our new AMD FidelityFX Shadow Denoiser

As it turns out, that was just the beginning of our effects-related releases this month, as you’re about to discover:

Hybrid shadows

NEW – Hybrid Shadows sample

We are really excited to introduce this brand new sample code, which shows off a way to use ray tracing and traditional rasterization to accelerate high-quality shadows. It also incorporates our new shadow denoiser, which was developed specifically for this technique and tuned for each platform.

UPDATED – Cauldron v1.4 

We can’t release new and updated effects without giving more love to Cauldron, our mini engine and renderer that hosts our samples, by upgrading it with a bunch of new features too. These include a magnifying glass for close up pixel inspection, log file support, DPI scaling awareness for the UI, wireframe mode, a new lighting/shadow import pipeline, and much more. We’ve also updated glTFSample, which demonstrates how to use most of Cauldron’s features.

UPDATED – AMD FidelityFX CACAO (Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion)

Our RDNA™-optimized implementation of ambient occlusion now has highly optimized native resolution SSAO, and we’ve also made downsampled resolution SSAO quality improvements.

UPDATED – AMD FidelityFX LPM (Luminance Preserving Mapper aka HDR Mapper)

This is our open source library for easily integrating HDR and wide gamut tone and gamut mapping into your game. These latest updates include windowed mode HDR10 support for DirectX®12, among others. LPM is highly configurable, so to make it even easier for you to get started integrating LPM into your game, we’ve produced a custom LPM config setup for each scene, and a test pattern in our sample.

UPDATED – AMD FidelityFX Parallel Sort

One of our newer FidelityFX effects, Parallel Sort is an RDNA™-optimized version of the Radix Sort algorithm. We’ve now added Vulkan® support.

That’s not all! RGP (Radeon GPU Profiler) is our ground-breaking, low-level optimization tool that provides detailed information on Radeon™ GPUs. We’ve introduced quite a few updates recently, and while we’ve written a few tutorials about these new features (v1.9, v1.10) we thought you might like the option to watch a video as well.

NEW – Video: Radeon GPU Profiler v1.10

This new video, “Radeon™ GPU Profiler 1.10”, is presented by the senior manager of our tools team, Gordon Selley. It covers the recent support for AMD Radeon™ RX6000 series GPUs, a new memory cache counter feature, and support for DirectX® and Vulkan® ray tracing. 

And finally – we also have a significant update to what has been happening with our physically-based path-traced rendering engine, Radeon ProRender. There are a lot of exciting things to talk about, so we’ve given it a blog post of its own.

UPDATED – Radeon ProRender v2.2.3

Takahiro Harada, an architect and researcher working on Radeon ProRender, explains the latest exciting developments with Radeon ProRender, including Cryptomatte support, light group AOVs, deformation motion blur, homogeneous volume support, and our toon material.

That’s all for now, but just in case you missed them, we’ll leave you with these now-available-to-everyone links to the talks our engineers presented at Microsoft® Game Stack Live:

With raytraced visuals bumping rendering quality even higher than ever before, a significant amount of fine tuning is required to maintain real-time performance. A typical way to achieve this is to trace fewer rays, and to make sense of the noisier output that method delivers. 

This presentation will explain how the AMD FidelityFX Denoiser allows for high-quality raytracing results without increasing rays per pixel, and deep dives into specific AMD RDNA™ 2-based optimizations that benefit both Xbox Series X|S and PC.

Join AMD on an adventure thru “Zen 2” and “Zen 3” processors which power today’s game consoles and PCs. Dive into instruction sets, cache hierarchies, resource sharing, and simultaneous multi-threading. Journey across the sands of silicon to master microarchitecture and uncover best practices!

Related links

Shadow Denoiser

AMD FidelityFX™ Denoiser

AMD FidelityFX Denoiser is a set of denoising compute shaders which remove artefacts from reflection and shadow rendering.

AMD Radeon GPU Profiler

Radeon™ GPU Profiler

RGP gives you unprecedented, in-depth access to a GPU. Easily analyze graphics, async compute usage, event timing, pipeline stalls, barriers, bottlenecks, and other performance inefficiencies.

AMD Radeon ProRender SDK

AMD Radeon™ ProRender SDK

AMD Radeon™ ProRender SDK is a powerful physically-based path traced rendering engine that enables creative professionals to produce stunningly photorealistic images.