AMD Capsaicin Graphics Framework Out Now, Includes GI-1.0 Real-Time Solution

wccftech.com:

Today, the GPUOpen website was updated with the new AMD Capsaicin graphics rendering research framework based on Microsoft's DirectX12 API.

AMD Capsaicin (not to be confused with the GPUs released around seven years ago) is a graphics rendering framework designed to encourage fast prototyping of new features. Its core principle includes creating simpler abstractions of common rendering operations so that game developers may focus on writing algorithms instead of having to deal with complex API specifics.

The framework is based on a modular design to better support multiple concurrent developers and research implementations. AMD Capsaicin's 1.0 release includes several HLSL functions for material sampling, light sampling, spherical harmonics, and more. There are also several common rendering techniques like TAA, SSGI, Tone Mapping, and Ambient Occlusion, among others.

The most interesting feature by far currently available in the AMD Capsaicin framework is the GI-1.0 real-time global illumination solution, based on the paper A Fast Scalable Two-Level Radiance Caching Scheme for Real-Time Global Illumination (Guillaume Boissé, Sylvain Meunier, Heloise de Dinechin, Matthew Oliver, Pieterjan Bartels, Alexander Veselov, Kenta Eto, Takahiro Harada).

The main goal of GI-1.0 is to use additional lighting structures to reduce the sample rates for ray tracing and thus improve performance. The two-level scheme caches the radiance and uses it for sampling. AMD Senior Graphics Programmer Guillaume Boisse explained in this GDC 2023 presentation:

Screen probes are our first level of caching. They position directly onto the primary surfaces and only onto the primary surfaces. They cache the incoming radiance across the hemisphere, and