Epic Games releases RealityScan 2.2 with AMD GPU support
Epic Games has released RealityScan 2.2, the latest version of its professional desktop photogrammetry software, formerly known as RealityCapture.
The update introduces support for GPU acceleration on AMD GPUs – both consumer and workstation cards – with users able to mix both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs in a single machine.
Epic has also released Pano2Views, a free online tool for converting equirectangular footage from 360-degree cameras into a format that RealityScan can process.
A desktop photogrammetry tool for games, VFX, visualization and urban planning
First released in 2016 and originally known as RealityCapture, RealityScan generates accurate triangle-based meshes of real-world objects, from people and props to environments.
Its core photogrammetry toolset, for generating 3D meshes from sets of source images, is augmented by support for laser scan data.
The software includes features aimed at aerial surveying and urban planning, but is also used in the entertainment industry to generate assets for use in games and VFX.
RealityCapture was acquired by Epic Games in 2021, which made the software available free to artists and studios with revenue under $1 million/year in 2024.
RealityScan 2.2: now no longer NVIDIA-only
RealityScan 2.2 brings what Epic Games describes as “one of the most-requested features in RealityScan history”: AMD GPU support.
Every stage in the scene-reconstruction pipeline currently accelerated on NVIDIA GPUs is “now equally accelerated” on AMD hardware, offering the “same speed [and] no compromises”.
Support extends to both consumer and professional cards released over the past four years: cards with AMD’s RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 architectures.
That includes workstation GPUs from the Radeon Pro W7000 Series and Radeon AI Pro 9000 Series, gaming cards from the Radeon RX 7000 and 9000 Series, and integrated processors from the Ryzen AI Max Pro (‘Strix Halo’) family.
However, AMD GPUs are currently only supported on Windows systems. Linux support – important for the CLI edition of RealityScan for server farms – is “coming later”.
One of a growing number of formerly NVIDIA-only CG apps to support AMD
The news makes RealityScan one of a number of formerly NVIDIA-only CG applications to get AMD GPU support, the most visible recent example being Chaos’s V-Ray renderer.
In most of those cases, the conversion was done using AMD’s HIP framework, which lets developers create software that run on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs from a single code base.
Epic’s blog post announcing the release doesn’t mention HIP, but you can mix and match AMD and NVIDIA GPUs in the same machine, with RealityScan “splitting the work across every supported GPU in parallel”, so our guess is that it would have been used.
Pano2Views: convert 360-degree footage into a format that RealityScan can process
Outside the core software, Epic Games has released Pano2Views, a free online tool for converting footage from 360-degree cameras into a format that RealityScan can use.
As Epic’s online tutorial notes: “360 cameras are tempting for photogrammetry: one capture covers the whole scene. The catch is that the panoramic image they produce isn’t the format a normal reconstruction pipeline expects.”
Pano2Views converts footage or image sequences exported from a 360-degree camera in equirectangular format to cube maps, which can then be imported into RealityScan.
It supports the JPG, PNG, MP4 and MOV file formats, and automatically attaches an XMP sidecar to the cubemaps it generates to tell RealityScan that it doesn’t need to undistort the images.
Price, system requirements and release date
RealityScan 2.2 is compatible with Windows 10+ and Windows Server 2016+. The CLI build for Linux servers is compatible with Ubuntu 24.04 or Fedora 39.
RealityScan is free to artists and studios with revenue under $1 million/year. For larger studios, subscriptions cost $1,250/seat/year.
Read an overview of the new features in RealityScan 2.2 on the product website
Read a full list of new features in RealityScan 2.2 in the online release notes
(Includes a full list of AMD GPUs supported by the software)
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