Monday, August 24th, 2020 Posted by Jim Thacker

AMD releases new beta of Radeon ProRender 2.0


The experimental Radeon ProRender 2.0 render mode inside Radeon ProRender for Maya. The latest beta of the Radeon ProRender 2.0 SDK adds support for Light Path Expressions and the MaterialX material format.


AMD has released a new beta of of the Radeon ProRender 2.0 SDK, the next major version of its hardware-agnostic physically based GPU renderer.

The update adds support for Light Path Expressions and the MaterialX material interchange format, alongside existing features like improved performance when rendering on both CPU and GPU.

The new features are available as experimental previews within new beta builds of AMD’s free Radeon ProRender plugins for Blender and Maya.

A free, physically accurate, hardware-agnostic GPU renderer
Radeon ProRender is an unbiased path tracer with a fairly standard range of production features, including integrated AI denoising.

It’s GPU-accelerated, and being based on the OpenCL and Metal APIs, is compatible with both AMD and non-AMD GPUs, and can run across Windows, Linux and macOS.

The renderer is currently integrated – or at least, bundled as a plugin with – a range of DCC and CAD applications, including Cinema 4D, Modo and SolidWorks Visualize.

In addition, free integration plugins are available for 3ds Max, Blender, Houdini, Maya and Unreal Engine.



New in Radeon ProRender 2.0: support for MaterialX and LPEs, new light types
First released in beta in May, version 2.0 of the SDK improves performance when rendering on CPU and GPU, and adds support for Infinity Fabric Link Bridge, enabling users to pool memory across AMD GPUs.

New features in the latest beta include support for MaterialX, the ILM-developed open standard for the exchange of material data, now supported in a range of DCC tools including Substance Designer.

The update also adds support for Light Path Expressions, making it possible for developers integrating the renderer into their software to define custom render passes to supplement its existing AOVs.

Other new features include support for sphere and disk lights as alternative fo point and directional lights when increased physical accuracy is required in an image, at the cost of increased render time.

Available in preview in the Blender and Maya integration plugins
As well as the SDK itself, the new features are available as experimental previews within new beta builds of AMD’s integration plugins for Blender and Maya, both for final-quality and viewport rendering.

You can read more about the new features in Radeon ProRender 2.5 for Blender in a separate story. The changelog for Radeon ProRender 2.9.42 for Maya can be found on the plugin’s GitHub repository.

Availability and system requirements
The Radeon ProRender 2.0 SDK is available to developers under an open-source Apache 2.0 licence.


Read more about the new features in Radeon ProRender 2.0 SDK on AMD’s blog