GPUOpen

Getting started:

Development and

performance

RDNA2 chip

We’re proud of the ever-increasing size of GPUOpen as a repository for powerful software and highly detailed documentation to help you get the best out of your game or graphics application.

With so much content available, if you’re new to graphics development or performance optimizations, or even just new to AMD tools, libraries, or effects, it’s not always easy to know where to start. This page is designed to be a helping hand to point you in the right direction!

Note: If you’re looking for a similar page to help you get started with our tools, SDKs, libraries, and effects – then make sure you head over to our “Getting started: Our software” page!

Jump to the section you need:

New to graphics programming or AMD hardware?

Videos and presentations

Our engineers regularly present at industry conferences and/or produce videos which provide an introduction to various graphics development concepts.

These links to YouTube videos normally provide an opportunity to download the slides shown as well – usually in the YouTube description.

Sometimes events aren’t recorded, but we can still share the slides from the presentation with you. The slide deck below is great for those just getting started with games development.

game_friendly_graphics_debugging

Make Your Game Friendly for Graphics Debugging and Optimization - Digital Dragons 2019

Adam Sawicki talks you through the various ways you can make your game easier to debug and optimize. Covering topics such as hidden front end menu screens, developer game builds, debug and validation layers, using tools, and much more, this presentation is essential for new game devs.

If you’re just after information on our AMD RDNA™ architecture, this is the place to start:

rdna_architecture

AMD RDNA™ Architecture

Produced by our engineers, this guide is an approachable walk through how AMD RDNA GPUs work, with some helpful advice along the way!

Make sure you visit our “Developing for” Vulkan® and DirectX®12 pages, as there are some excellent presentations linked there for both beginners and more experienced developers.

AMD developer documentation

We’ve written many useful guides on various AMD-specific development concepts, as well as information on more general principles.

Understanding GPU context rolls

Learn what a context roll on our GPUs is, how they apply to the pipeline and how they’re managed, and what you can do to analyse them and find out if they’re a limiting factor in the performance of your game or application.

First Steps When Implementing FP16

Half-precision (FP16) computation is a performance-enhancing GPU technology long exploited in console and mobile devices not previously used or widely available in mainstream PC development.

CPU Core Count Detection on Windows®

Due to architectural differences between Zen and our previous processor architecture, Bulldozer, developers need to take care when using the Windows® APIs for processor and core enumeration.

Getting the Most Out of Delta Color Compression

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® and DirectX®

We have dedicated pages for both low-level APIs, where you can find appropriate documentation, videos, samples, and links to relevant tools. These pages are suitable for both beginners and experienced developers. Head over there now if it’s programming help you’re after!

Vulkan logo

Developing Vulkan® applications

Discover our Vulkan blog posts, presentations, samples, and more. Find out how we can help you create and optimize your Vulkan applications!

DirectX 12

Developing DirectX® applications

Developing with DirectX? This page shares our DirectX blog posts, presentations, samples, and more. Let us help you create and optimize your DirectX applications!

Improving performance

Guides

Our regularly-updated performance guides are a great place to start whether you’re looking for easy wins, or final tweaks.

Videos and presentations

Watch these presentations by our engineers who give excellent advice on optimizing for AMD CPUs and GPUs.

These slide decks are also fantastic for those looking to understand the basics of analysis and optimization.

Surfing wave fronts

Surfing the Wave(front)s with Radeon GPU Profiler - GDC 2019

Dominik Baumeister shows you how to use RGP to identify problems relating to barriers, async, and compression, explains the underlying issues, and tells you how to fix them!

Blogs

These are just some of our detailed performance-related blogs available here on GPUOpen. Find more on our developer guides page.

Reducing Vulkan® API call overhead

This guest post, by Arseny Kapoulkine from Roblox, looks at the costs associated with calling various Vulkan functions tens or hundreds of thousands of times per frame, and ways to bring them down.

Fetching From Cubes and Octahedrons

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.

Game engines - Unreal Engine and Unity

Plugins and patches

We provide support for both engines with plugins and patches. These include FidelityFX Super Resolution for both, and for Unreal we have a wide range of both performance and feature (primarily effects) patches you can apply to your UE build to use. 

We have dedicated pages for both engines, where you can find these:

Unity

Unity

Develop for Unity® on AMD hardware with our FidelityFX™ Super Resolution patch for URP and built-in support for HDRP.

Unreal Engine

Develop for Unreal Engine on AMD hardware with our plugin, performance and feature patches, including FidelityFX support.

Blogs

We have shared a lot of detailed information on how to make use of the plugins we provide, as well as useful tips on performance, including our extremely popular Unreal Engine performance guide!

Explore GPUOpen!

This page is only the beginning. There are hundreds of pages on GPUOpen we haven’t linked to here. 

You can use the menu at the top to explore further, or take a look at some starting points for further reading below:

AMD GPUOpen News

Latest news and updates for games and graphics developers from AMD’s GPUOpen.

GPUOpen Manuals

Don’t miss our manual documentation! And if slide decks are what you’re after, you’ll find 100+ of our finest presentations here.

AMD GPUOpen documentation

Explore our huge collection of detailed tutorials, sample code, presentations, and documentation to find answers to your graphics development questions.

AMD GPUOpen events

Come see us in person! Or the next best thing – enjoy our large library of presentations from various developer events.

AMD GPUOpen videos

Words not enough? How about pictures? How about moving pictures? We have some amazing videos to share with you!

AMD GPUOpen publications

Discover our published publications.