2008, April 21 - Redsdk 1.4 released, first full HDR real-time engine, even on legacy hardware!

While most of the best CPU based ray tracers are already 128bit (HDR) capable, it may sound usual to support a full HDR rendering pipeline, but it is not. Indeed, the RED engine offers a full HDR rendering pipeline for all usages (real-time, off-line high quality images). This way, lights and geometries reflect their correct intensities, resulting in more realistic images & animations.
Furthermore, the full-HDR pipeline is also available on legacy hardware, with an integrated full HDR emulation mode, on all Amd/Ati and Nvidia cards which are less than 6-7 years old.
On the right, you can see the difference between a 32bit rendering workflow (left side of the picture) and a 128bit one (right side of the picture)

The RED engine now enables the user to dynamically update a cube map. This can replace ray traced reflections at a lower cost for all real-time applications.

Looking for better performances, both for rasterization & ray tracing is what our customers expect from a middleware supplier like Redway3d. In Redsdk 1.4, numerous functionalities have been optimized, like the memory footprint of ray traced shadows and rendering materials.
In the same way, the scalability of the RED engine has also been increased. Redsdk users will notice a 5% to 30% speed increase on large model assemblies (100K+ objects).

Redsdk now offers a built-in memory leak tracker and analysis tool. New RED engine classes have been created to get a complete map of all memory resources created & used by the RED engine, sorted by category (Ray Tracer, Images [2D, 3D, cube, composites, read back], shapes [ with & without transforms], Materials, Shaders, Cluster, Strings ...).
Redsdk users can now better debug their application, by finding the graphics resources which have been managed incorrectly.

Redsdk now offers its own standalone test suite, which can be used by any RED engine user to test & certify hardware platforms. The RED engine test suite not only validate the RED engine functionalities but also their execution time.
The RED engine test suite generates a HTML report which provides a summary of the tests, resulting of a per pixel comparison between the grabbed images during execution time and pictures of reference.