Includes AMD Ryzen AI Max Pro processor with up to 96 GB of graphics memory
Chaos V-Ray will soon support AMD GPUs, so users of the photorealistic rendering software can choose from a wider range of graphics hardware including the AMD Radeon Pro W7000 series and the AMD Ryzen AI Max Pro processor that has an integrated Radeon GPU.
Until now, V-Ray’s GPU renderer has been limited to Nvidia RTX GPUs via the CUDA platform, while its CPU renderer has long worked with processors from both Intel and AMD.
Chaos plans to roll out the changes publicly in every edition of V-Ray, including 3ds Max, SketchUp, Revit and Rhino, Maya, and Blender.
At Autodesk University last month, both Dell and HP showcased V-Ray GPU running on AMD GPUs – Dell on a desktop workstation with a discrete AMD Radeon Pro W7600 GPU and HP on a HP ZBook Ultra G1a with the new AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor, where up to 96 GB of the 128 GB unified memory can be allocated as VRAM.
“[With the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395} you can load massive scenes without having to worry so much about memory limitations,” says Vladimir Koylazov, head of innovation, Chaos. “We have a massive USD scene that we use for testing, and it was really nice to see it actually being rendered on an AMD [processor]. It wouldn’t be possible on [most] discrete GPUs, because they don’t normally have that much memory.”
This new capability has been made possible through AMD HIP (Heterogeneous-Compute Interface for Portability) — an open-source toolkit that allows developers to port CUDA-based GPU applications to run on AMD hardware without the need to create and maintain a new code base.
“HIP handles complicated pieces of code, like V-Ray GPU, a lot better than OpenCL used to do, says Koylazov. “Everything we support in V-Ray GPU on other platforms is now supported on AMD GPUs.”
Chaos isn’t alone in embracing AMD GPUs. Earlier this year, product design focused viz tool KeyShot also added support, which we put to the test in our HP ZBook Ultra G1a review.
