Formerly known as AMD FireRays, Radeon Rays 2.0 is targeted at content developers who want to utilize high-performance ray-tracing capabilities with AMD GPUs, CPUs, and APUs via asynchronous compute. Unlike Nvidia’s RTX ray-tracing technology, which runs on Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing API, Radeon Rays is open source and conforms to the OpenCL 1.2 standard, so it could be deployed with non-AMD hardware and on multiple OS environments.
Whereas Nvidia seems to be poised to launch real-time ray-tracing in games within this year (despite currently limited GPU support for RTX), Radeon Rays is still very much a developer tool. However, AMD is on the same path with its new ProRender release, which now supports real-time GPU acceleration of ray-tracing techniques mixed with traditional rasterization-based rendering and is now built on the Vulkan 1.1 API, which is fully supported by GNC-based AMD GPUs with the latest Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition driver.