Maxon Redshift With AMD Radeon GPU Rendering Support Now Available

Last spring, Maxon announced that its popular Redshift renderer would be gaining support for AMD’s Radeon graphics cards. As with some competing engines (eg: Chaos V-Ray), most of Redshift’s existence has revolved around NVIDIA’s CUDA API, which of course means an NVIDIA GPU was required for use. Ahead of the AMD GPU support announcement last spring, Maxon added CPU rendering support in, so in just a little over a year, Redshift render device support has tripled.

With Redshift supporting both AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards now, we’re hopeful that consideration of support for Intel’s Arc GPUs will come along somewhere down the pipe. As we’ve talked about before, Arc’s rendering performance is excellent, with Intel’s sub-$350 GPUs able to go toe-to-toe with AMD’s higher-end parts.

Maxon Redshift render using AMD Radeon GPU; Credit: Raw & Rendered

After looking through Maxon’s support pages, we can’t find a definitive list of Radeon GPUs that will work with Redshift, but it does appear the entire RDNA, RDNA2, and RDNA3 family will work. Older cards have been hinted at being supported, including from the Vega generation, but we’ve not seen proof of that yet (we’ll test this out when able).

Other updates that have hit Redshift today include support for the Flakes shader in all of the DCCs supported by the engine, while Cinema 4D’s Distorter node is now integrated with Redshift inside of the suite. Also of note, Redshift Materials can now be seamlessly imported into Unreal Engine, proving that Redshift isn’t just continually augmenting its hardware support, but software support, too.

Anyone currently subscribed to Redshift should immediately see this latest update. If you’re wanting to test AMD GPU support, you should grab the latest Adrenalin (Radeon) or Enterprise (Radeon PRO) driver. At this point, we have absolutely no idea what to expect performance-wise from AMD’s GPUs, but we hope to find out soon. Note, though: this is considered an open beta, so it’s best to not count on it for production work until Maxon declares it reliable enough to lift the beta tag.