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AMD: It's Time To Open Up the GPU (gpuopen.com)
An anonymous reader writes: AMD has called for the opening up of GPU technology to developers. Nicolas Thibieroz, a senior engineering manager for the company, announced today the launch of GPUOpen, its initiative to provide code and documentation to PC developers, embracing open source and collaborative development with the community. He says, "Console games often tap into low-level GPU features that may not be exposed on PC at the same level of functionality, causing different — and usually less efficient — code paths to be implemented on PC instead. Worse, proprietary libraries or tools chains with "black box" APIs prevent developers from accessing the code for maintenance, porting or optimizations purposes. Game development on PC needs to scale to multiple quality levels, including vastly different screen resolutions." And here's how AMD wants to solve this: "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." They've begun by posting several technical articles to help developers understand and use various tools, and they say more content will arrive soon.
>> AMD: It's Time To Open Up the GPU
Translation: quit optimizing for proprietary Intel technology, start developing and optimizing for AMD's proprietary technology, particularly LiquidVR, instead
call me when Intel signs up otherwise meh
As an indie game developer this is fantastic news. I hope Apple also make good use of this, the Apple OpenGL drivers run at about half the speed of AMD's Windows OpenGL drivers on the same hardware (a recent Mac Pro with dual D700s under OS X and Bootcamp-ed to Windows).
Hopefully it also means that Open Source folks (FSM bless 'em) will also improve the install process for AMD/ATI drivers on Linux, if not the performance.
This is great news for those working in real time 3D.
except they actually have opened up their technology, and very often they've opened up NEW technology. from AMD64, to HT link to their GPU specs (resulting in open source AMD drivers rivaling the propitiatory drivers in speed, and being MILES ahead of nvidia's open source drivers (which don't even have support for ANY 9xx series cards yet)).
tressFX is going to release 3.0 soon, mantle formed the basis for vulkan and now we get openGPU.
Recent?
Do you remember what was the first operating system to get AMD64 support back in early 2000's? That's right, Linux.
Also mid-2000's when AMD purchased ATI, first thing they did was throwing out documentation for open source developers to develop better drivers, also they have invested millions in development of open Linux graphics stack, and this happened very early on. They've always been pretty open, this is not recent behavior.
Nvidia, holding like 70-80% of the market share, does afford to close things down and stuff proprietary techs down your throat, but AMD as the underdog, does not. Openess is their best bet.
There are no "goodies" or "baddies" here.
There are now. AMD, through necessity, has chosen the right path. NVidia, through ability, has chosen the wrong path.
Even now, when AMD cards perform worse than NVidia, I have started choosing AMD for both personal and professional use because of the Open Source AMD drivers. AMD's doubling down on Open Source has validated that decision, and I will likely never buy, nor recommend to my customers, another NVidia card.
I have completely inverted my recommendations for Linux video. It used to be, "buy NVidia and be done with it," since AMD's driver was a huge pain in the ass to get working on Linux. But Open Source has a powerful appeal to me, having been burned over and over again by proprietary business practices over the decades, and now my recommendation has switched to AMD for the same reason.