Amd ProRender

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ProRender the renderer formaly known as FireRender, is a OpenSource pathtracer from AMD. The 3dsMax plugin is develped by the Render Legion guys who created the fameous Corona renderer. The feature set is quite nice, the renderer already supports several highend features. It is based on OpenCL which benefits from the good AMD graphics card support. If I read this statement correctly: "Written using OpenCL 1.2, Radeon ProRender can run on virtually any hardware, including hardware that supports the OpenCL standard." you can even do a CPU only rendering if OpenCL is supported.

This sounds really interesting. It is one step further than Nvidias Optix or Intels Embree, because they offer not only the framework but a complete renderer. Let's see how it evolves.

Update from November 2016: It seems that Maxon selected ProRender as GPU renderer for Cinema4D what is a great step forward.

Features:

Release 2.0:

Unfortunately it is almost impossible to tell anything about new features or fixed bugs because there are no release notes available. However they now have an Uber material which covers most material effects the user usually need. The layered material is still not correct created and causes errors.

First Review:

It is amazing: This is a really early version of ProRender but the integration is quite good. Viewport 2.0 is supported, Maya's material preview as well as shader swatches. From my own tries I know how much work a clean implementation is. Often the very first version of a plugin renderer is missing a good render globals implementation and the install process is missing some basic features. Not so in this case. The plugin is correctly built with a module what makes it easy to handle. That's much more useful than Redshift which uses it's own strategy to setup the environment.

My GPU is not the newes one so the speed is not too extremly high, yet the fact that it runs on a non AMD GPU is great. And it is still free, I can't believe it. It even has a viewport render option so you can select if you want to render with Viewport2.0 or ProRender, nice feature.

Bottel scene Review:

Please keep in mind that this is done with an quite early beta of ProRender.

During the preparation of the scene I had no crashes or other stability problems. The manuals are not yet complete so I was unable to get rid of all the noise, but it worked quite fine. And I have an NVIDIA GPU which works fine with the renderer. I only used the GPU mode because the CPU mode did not show the same quality, even the camera angle of view was a little bit different. Unfortunately the texture placement tools do not yet support coverage and frame offset so I was unable to place the label correctly. I'll check it out as soon as I get some news from the devlopers. Even if motionblur works, I was not able to make it correct in my scene. As you can see in the image, there is still some noise. I played around with the sampling and antialiasing settings, but it did not change the noise very much. Maybe with an insane high number of iterations. But hey, it is just a try because the manuals are not completly done.

The viewport rendering works as expected, a good way to speed up shader work and lighting.

Radeon ProRender come with a library of materials. I just picked a glass material and assigned it. This is extremly helpful and saves a lot of time. As a first conclusion, the developers are creating a relly fine renderer and a really good implementation. I'll do some further tests as soon as new features are supported.

The final scene can be downloaded here.

 

 

Last update: 01.2021


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