2007, December 06 - Redsdk 1.3 released, performance limits are blown up

The RED engine was previously only exploiting the parallelism between one CPU core and multiple GPUs. Thanks to its full parallelization, it now uses all the CPU cores and still all the GPUs (AMD/Ati CrossFire and NVidia SLI architectures) available on your hardware.
As multi-core CPUs are currently standard configurations, customers can expect performance improvements of at least 50%, without changing a single line of the existing code. Indeed, the parallelization between the CPU cores, the GPUs, and the synchronization between CPUs and GPUs is fully managed by the RED engine.

The rendering of multi-sampling area lights and shadows offer a good tradeoff between the picture / animation quality and the rendering processing time.
While multi-sampled area lights and shadows have been available from software ray tracers for a while, the unique combination of CPUs and GPUs in Redsdk make them computed a lot faster. Furthermore, the use of GPU accelerated true anti-aliasing function in Redsdk, make the required number of samples for area lights and shadows lower for the same picture / animation rendering quality, thus decreasing even more the necessary rendering time.

Redsdk, while still being capable of rendering custom shaders for display or computation needs, offers more built-in shader functions. The HLR (Hidden Line Removal) is one of them, allowing the use of 3D to generate drawings for printing or e-publishing in real-time.
In parallel, Redsdk now offers an optimized support for many 2D functions, the most important one being the drawing of lines. Redsdk can therefore display millions of lines in your application viewport, without suffering any real-time penalty.

Support of multi-platforms is a key asset of the RED engine graphics middleware. Indeed, while you may want to support and certify your 3D application on several OSes or simply distribute your 3D executables and ensure a reliable and efficient viewing of your data, the RED engine will provide and ensure this portability without extra developments. To extand its range of supported Operating Systems, the RED engine has recently been ported on 64bit compatible architectures to enable the best use of the latest hardware configurations and their increased amount of memory (hardware configurations with more than 4GB of memory).
Redsdk is currently validated on W2000 Professional SP4, Windows XP Professional SP2, Windows XP Professional x64 edition SP2, Windows Vista Business 32bit and Windows Vista Business 64bit.

In order to continuously improve and extend the range of the Redsdk supported hardware, the AMD/Ati R600 chipset is now fully compatible with Redsdk.
Redsdk currently runs on all Amd/Ati Radeon cards 9600 and up, AMD/Ati FireGL boards T2-128 and up, Nvidia GeForce Fx cards and up, Nvidia Quadro Fx boards and up.