RED: Ray tracing of Dynamic Elements

The R.E.D.* technology uses new methods which optimize the power of the processing and graphical units:

CPU for interactions between objects and light sources
GPU for systematic rendering

"The innovation is based on a new hybrid CPU/GPU ray tracing technology which delivers an acceleration factor of 10+ compared to similar rendering technologies. This speed-up ratio essentially stems from a move of selected CPU operations on the GPU, boosting the massive processing and material rendering capabilities of graphic units", Renaud DEPARIS (Co-founder of Redway3d, former 3D Visualization manager at Dassault Systèmes).

RED is the core technology of all products sold by Redway3d. It enables the interactive rendering of complex 3D scenes with an unmatched quality (smooth and colored shadows, reflections, refractions, transparencies, ...).

The R.E.D. technology is packaged in a C++ Software Development Kit called Redsdk which offers the following benefits:

A single API for real-time 2D, 3D and photo-realistic rendering
The best of a real-time engine for professional uses coupled with a hardware accelerated (CPU+GPU) ray tracer
A 100% dynamic graphics core, all the parameters can be modified/updated without any time penalty


Global illumination : Redsdk 2.2 Redsdk 2.2 adds its own global illumination algorithms (GI) to its photo-realistic quality, together with the new Skylight type of light for outdoors renderings. Windows 7 is also supported in both 32bit and native 64bit versions.

CPU and GPU combined at will: Redsdk 2.1 Redsdk 2.1 runs in "hybrid" (CPU + GPU) and "CPU only" modes. Redsdk based applications can now be easily deployed on the web, support blade servers render farms or even virtualized environments in a transparent way.

A complete library of materials: Redsdk 2.0 Redmaterials offers ready-to-use materials for a wide range of categories (metals, woods, glasses, etc.). Each material supports real-time and photo-realistic settings. Redsdk 2.0 offers also several improvements related to performance and new hardware support.

The Linux move: Redsdk 1.5 Redsdk supports Linux in addition to Windows. In terms of rendering quality, the glossy effects improve the rendering quality in a terrific way and the visualization of texts was also improved. First graphics midldeware certified by NVIDIA® & AMD-ATI.

The HDR (r)evolution: Redsdk 1.4 Redsdk rendering pipeline can be customized between 32bit and 128bit floating point resolution. Several performance improvements are released, due to algorithm modifications and new hardware features available from GPU manufacturers.

A killing release: Redsdk 1.3 The support of Vista as well as native 64bit Windows versions are released. Redsdk scales between multiple CPU-cores and multiple GPUs architectures, in an automatic way, but still customizable. Area sampling is added to real-time and ray tracing rendering modes.

An optional graphics file format: Redsdk 1.2 Redsdk offers a .red file format dedicated to 2D/3D graphics & customizable. Volume visualization can be combined to the other features proposed by Redsdk.

A recursive ray tracer: Redsdk 1.1 The hybrid ray tracer (CPU + GPU) now supports recursive rays, multiple levels of reflections, refractions, etc. Redsdk adds the support of the GLSL shading programming language in addition to the ARB one, supported initially..

A true middleware: Redsdk 1.0 The technology was packaged in a single API for real-time and ray tracing, called Redsdk. Advanced visualization features (composite materials) were exposed in a way programmers could develop unique materials for direct and indirect lighting purposes.

Foundations of the RED engine technology The first 3 years were dedicated to the development of an up to date real-time graphics toolkit for professional 2D/3D display, with the implementation of basic ray tracing functions (mainly a first level of hard ray traced shadows & true reflections) accelerated at the GPU, since the programmable graphics cards were becoming more popular at that time. From the beginning the technology was designed to be 100% dynamic, scalable, taking the best of the rasterization & ray tracing worlds … while being as much accelerated as possible by the GPU. The RED engine will be a top level real-time 2D/3D professional toolkit with ray tracing extensions!