AMD have just open sourced the Capsaicin framework. Capsaicin is their development testbed for creating and testing new graphics techniques and algorithms. Along side the release of Capsaicin they have also released implementations of Real-Time Global Illumination as well as a Path Tracing implementation. The Capsaicin framework is open source under the MIT license with the source code hosted on GitHub. It requires a Direct12 compatible GPU, working on both NVIDIA and AMD hardware.
Details of the framework from the AMD blog:
AMD Capsaicin Framework is our new rendering research framework which is easy-to-use, flexible, and designed for fast prototyping and development of real-time rendering research. It is built around creating simple abstractions over complex low-level hardware implementation details to allow developers to focus on writing algorithms instead of dealing with complex API specifics. The framework makes efforts to ensure these abstractions are performant, but the priority is rapid developer iteration and debugging. AMD Capsaicin Framework is therefore not intended to be a high-performance product development tool.
A key concept within AMD Capsaicin Framework is the ability to support multiple different research implementations and multiple concurrent developers independently working within the code base. To enable this, the framework uses a modular design that allows for different components to be independently developed and then combined/reused in different ways. This flexibility allowed us to quickly iterate over various rendering pipelines, which was key to the development of the GI-1.0 algorithm.
Out of the box, the framework includes many useful HLSL functions for material sampling and evaluation, common math functions, light sampling and evaluation, spherical harmonics, random number generation, and more. Each of these can be used to quickly create new rendering algorithms and techniques. Speaking of techniques, the framework exposes pre-built techniques than can be mixed and matched as needed to create new render chains. Some of the stock components include Visibility Buffer generation, Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA), Screen-Space Global Illumination (SSGI), Light Sampling, Ray Tracing Acceleration structure building, Tone Mapping, glTF scene loading and more.
AMD Capsaicin Framework is still in its infancy and many areas are still very much ‘Work in Progress’ so expect more releases in the future as we continue to improve the framework and release some of our new algorithms and techniques – watch this space for more!
Key Links
You can learn more about the AMD Capsaicin graphics framework and the new path tracing and real-time global illumination implementations in the video below.