
AMD releases FireRays 2.0 ray-tracing library as open source - SXX
http://gpuopen.com/firerays-2-0-open-sourcing-and-customizing-ray-tracing/
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gear54rus
It appears that AMD is consistent with their contributions to open things.
Couple that with typically lower prices for comparable GPUs it makes me sad to
see that 30/70 percentage (of red to green) on e.g. Steam.

Green yet seems to employ every semi- or outright unfair strategy (gameworks,
extra tesselation) to stump them while still being typically 'closed' in its
ways.

~~~
yAnonymous
It's the same for both Nvidia and Intel: I dislike the companies for the
reasons you mentioned, but they do make superior products compared to AMD.

In Nvidia's case, they're a step ahead with the technology and they also put
more effort into efficient cooling, which is nice if you value your ears, and
evergy saving. They also seem to be constantly first with new software
features (automatic game settings, recording, streaming, ...).

AMD, with both CPUs and GPUs, offer comparable speed at lower prices, but not
a comparable product. If they did, I'd drop Intel/Nvidia in a heartbeat.

~~~
floatboth
Hopefully, Polaris and Zen are going to be massive improvements.

But even current cards like the Fury look fine, especially if you consider
DX12 and Vulkan performance. nVidia just spent a lot of money on optimizing
the drivers for DX11.

About recording & streaming — that's not just a software feature, that's
dedicated video encoding hardware on the cards. nVidia heavily pushed their
own software that uses the hardware, but AMD were the first with the hardware
itself, according to Wikipedia:

> Video Coding Engine was introduced with the Radeon HD 7900 on 22 December
> 2011

> [NVENC] was introduced with the Kepler-based GeForce 600 series in March
> 2012

~~~
lettergram
In general Nvidia makes a superior product, but it really depends what you are
talking about [1]. The new Nvidia 980Ti has the best power/price at the
moment. However, AMD is increasing power efficiency and being competitive,
competitive enough that I buy their GPUs because they work (or did) better
with Linux.

With the new GPUs I anticipate them being even more competitive if not
outright better for the power/price and power useage.

[1] [http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/](http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/)

~~~
cm3
Don't you mean GTX 1080?

~~~
lacksconfidence
Whats the current price for a 1080 delivered by Friday?

~~~
cm3
0 because it's not released until the 27th.

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escap
it can use OpenCL GPU as backend, so it works on Non AMD hardware (e.g. NVidia
Titan X )

Vulkan support for FireRays is currently a work-in-progress.

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dagw
Cool. Does anybody have any experience with both this and Nvidia OptiX Prime
and could comment on their differences?

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alkonaut
I see in the docs that it supports Embree as a back end. Embree is intels
library for doing the exact same thing (as far as I understand). So it feels
odd to use embree as a back end for this, I'd use this _instead_ of Embree,
not both. Can anyone explain?

~~~
CyberDildonics
A guess would be so that you can compare the current best open ray tracing
library on the CPU with their GPU implementation as well as switching to CPU
ray tracing under the same API.

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0x54MUR41
Source code: [https://github.com/GPUOpen-
LibrariesAndSDKs/FireRays_SDK](https://github.com/GPUOpen-
LibrariesAndSDKs/FireRays_SDK)

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tiplus
Why not contribute to Blender cycles instead?

~~~
taneq
Because they're open-sourcing an existing library?

To answer the larger question of "why create a new library instead of
contributing to open-source project X instead", the answer is that working on
other peoples' open-source projects (if you're actually going to improve them
rather than just throw more me-too mud at the wall) usually consists of
cleaning up other peoples' messes. You're at the mercy of a third party
maintainer, you're stuck with someone else's (probably terrible) design
decisions, and you're dealing with a list of existing bugs and defects.

I can't speak for everyone but just personally, if I'm doing a job like that,
it's because I'm being paid for it.

~~~
optimiz3
You're also at the mercy of their often unreasonable demands (testing bars and
sign-offs that they themselves never would pass).

