AMD Goes Open Source, Announces GPUOpen Initiative, Linux Compiler, Drivers (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: AMD announced today that the company is releasing a slew of open-source software and tools to give game developers, heterogeneous applications, and HPC applications deeper access to the GPU and GPU resources. AMD and their Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) are looking for ways to ease game development, so developers can more easily re-use code and port their games from consoles over to the PC. With GPUOpen, game developers will have direct access to GPU hardware, as well as access to a large collection of open source effects, tools, libraries and SDKs, which are being made available on GitHub under an MIT open-source license. As part of the effort, the company is also releasing a new HCC C++ compiler which will be a tool in enabling developers to more easily leverage the resources of discrete GPU hardware in heterogeneous systems. The HCC complier also allows developers to convert CUDA code to portable C++. According to AMD, internal testing shows that in many cases 90 percent or more of CUDA code can be automatically converted into C++ with the final 10 percent converted manually in the widely popular C++ language. An early access program for the "Boltzmann Initiative" tools is planned for Q1 2016.

Comments

Re:proof is in the pudding

[chuckymonkey]

It's been in the kernel for a few months and it's constantly being updated and fixed. They're actually doing a pretty good job of it honestly. The catalyst driver still doesn't use it, but they will soonish. Mesa uses it and it works really well actually. This is the earliest article I could find, more recent ones have mesa 11 benchmarks where the Radeon driver has almost caught up to the catalyst in some areas. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p...