3D intensive application performance may suffer greatly if the best graphics device is not selected. As a developer you can easily fix this problem by adding only one line to your executable’s source code.
Cross-lane operations are an efficient way to share data between wavefront lanes. This article covers in detail the cross-lane features that GCN3 offers.
Tamas Rabel from Creative Assembly discusses how performance was measured with the Total War Engine.
Game engines do most of their shading work per-pixel or per-fragment. But there is another alternative that has been popular in film for decades…
This post serves as a guide on how to best use the various Memory Heaps & Memory Types exposed in Vulkan on AMD drivers, starting with some high-level tips.
This article explains how to produce Hsaco from assembly code and also takes a closer look at some new features of the GCN architecture.
With shader extensions, we provide access to a much better tool to get compaction done: GCN provides a special op-code for compaction within a wavefront.
GCN hardware supports a special out-of-order rasterization mode which relaxes the ordering guarantee, and allows fragments to be produced out-of-order.
An explanation of how GCN hardware coalesces memory operations to minimize traffic throughout the memory hierarchy.
DCC is a domain-specific compression that tries to take advantage of data coherence. It’s lossless, and adapted for 3D rendering. The key idea is to process whole blocks instead of individual pixels.
Vulkan validation layers make it easier to catch any mistakes, provide useful information beyond basic errors and minimize portability issues.
For GPU-side dynamically generated data structures which need 3D spherical mappings, two of the most useful mappings are cubemaps and octahedral maps. This post explores the overhead of both mappings.
