AMD’s open source philosophy deserves a great deal of credit especially when you consider the competition utilizes proprietary features as demonstrated by NVIDIA Gameworks. During CES 2016, I had the pleasure of playing Star Wars Battlefront on AMD’s upcoming Polaris architecture. This open ideology is very impressive and showcases that AMD’s future chips are fully functional ahead of their launch. In contrast to this, details about Pascal are almost non-existent barring a few marketing photographs. Today, AMD released a huge blog post about their latest initiative entitled, GPUOpen. Here is a detailed run-down of the project in AMD’s words:
“GPUOpen is composed of two areas: Games & CGI for game graphics and content creation (which is the area I am involved with), and Professional Compute for high-performance GPU computing in professional applications.
GPUOpen is based on three principles:
The first is to provide code and documentation allowing PC developers to exert more control on the GPU. Current and upcoming GCN architectures (such as Polaris) include many features not exposed today in PC graphics APIs, and GPUOpen aims to empower developers with ways to leverage some of those features. In addition to generating quality or performance advantages such access will also enable easier porting from current-generation consoles (XBox One™ and PlayStation 4) to the PC platform.
The second is a commitment to open source software. The game and graphics development community is an active hub of enthusiastic individuals who believe in the value of sharing knowledge. Full and flexible access to the source of tools, libraries and effects is a key pillar of the GPUOpen philosophy. Only through open source access are developers able to modify, optimize, fix, port and learn from software. The goal? Encouraging innovation and the development of amazing graphics techniques and optimizations in PC games.
The third is a collaborative engagement with the developer community. GPUOpen software is hosted on public source code repositories such as GitHub as a way to enable sharing and collaboration. Engineers from different functions will also regularly write blog posts about various GPU-related topics, game technologies or industry news.”
This is fantastic news for developers and assists the optimization process through open source tools. In theory, the GPUOpen model allows developers free reign to properly understand the hardware and code in a much more efficient manner. Time will tell how popular this endeavour is, but it looks like a really good idea to build a strong relationship between developers and AMD users.
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