Part of the Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Drivers launch last week focussed upon AMD's professional graphics card users. Now AMD has provided some more blogging and video coverage of its pro edition drivers and the impact they can have on creative workflows. In particular AMD has provided engaging videos explaining the value of its Radeon Loom, and Radeon ProRender technologies.
Radeon Loom
Radeon Loom is an open source 360-degree video-stitching framework. This content creation feature aids in the creation of 360 degree visual experiences which might be used for immersive viewing and/or AR and VR experiences.
AMD says that a major challenge with 360 video creation is the seamless stitching of the output of the multiple camera arrays used to produce the imagery. Recording systems use anything from two to 31 cameras for 360 video scene recording. Such processing "can take hours of post processing and substantial compute resources". However, Radeon Loom leverages massively parallel GPU processing to help users achieve real-time live stitching of up to 24x cameras to 4K or 2K output (and faster offline stitching for up to 31 cameras to 8K or 4K output). Loom uses AMD's implementation of the Khronos OpenVX computer vision framework.
Radeon ProRender
Radeon ProRender is an accurate and fast physically-based rendering engine plug-in available for Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max, Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks (in beta), and Rhino (in beta). The plug in is on its way to Maxon Cinema 4D and to Blender in 2017. Linux users can use the Maya Radeon ProRender plugin now, and the Blender one when it becomes available next year.
AMD's ProRender is said to be simple to use, with an extensive, beautiful, 'physically correct' material library, and all with no licensing costs from AMD. For speed and efficiency it leverages your system's GPUs and CPUs, as long as your system supports OpenCL 1.2. AMD foresees ProRender being popular in architecture, automotive design, engineering and more. The free Radeon ProRender SDK is available on GPUOpen.com for application developers.
