GPUOpen

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 you won’t want to miss our “Getting started: Our software” page!

New to graphics programming or working with 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.

Compute Shaders - Game Industry Conference 2021

This talk introduces compute shaders, explaining ideas from a software and hardware perspective, as well as considerations when writing compute shaders.

Efficient Use of GPU Memory in Modern Games - Digital Dragons 2021

This Digital Dragons 2021 talk presents the current state of access to memory resources through the DirectX® 12 and Vulkan® APIs.

All the Pipelines - Journey through the GPU

This presentation by one of our engineers at GIC 2020 provides an introduction to the graphics pipeline.

From Source to ISA: A Trip Down the Shader Compiler Pipeline - YouTube link

This video will take you from the original source code down to the RDNA ISA. It covers control-flow, bindless resource access and scalarization, along with DXC, instruction selection,...

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.

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

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...

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

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.

How to get the most out of Smart Access Memory (SAM)

Smart Access Memory (SAM) provides the CPU with direct access to all video memory. These guidelines help you to improve CPU and GPU performance using SAM.

Using AMD FreeSync™ Premium Pro HDR Color Spaces

The first in a series of four tutorials related to AMD Freesync™ Premium Pro HDR. This tutorial covers terminology related to color.

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...

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.

Selecting the Best Graphics Device to Run a 3D Intensive Application

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...

AMD Driver Symbol Server

How to set up the AMD Driver Symbol Server in Visual Studio.

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...

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!

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!

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.

RDNA Performance Guide

Our one-stop resource for getting great AMD RDNA™ performance on Vulkan® and DirectX®12 APIs!

AMD Ryzen CPU Performance Guide

Design faster. Render faster. Iterate faster. Our one-stop resource for getting great AMD Ryzen performance.

Unreal Engine Performance Guide

Our one-stop guide to performance with Unreal Engine.

Videos and presentations

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

AMD Ryzen™ Processor Software Optimization (GDC 2022) - YouTube link

Join AMD for an introduction to the AMD Ryzen™ family of processors which power today’s game consoles and PCs.

Optimizing for the Radeon™ RDNA Architecture (Let's build 2020) - YouTube link

Learn about the details of RDNA and how it differs from the previous GCN architecture. Includes examples of optimizations based on the case study of implementing an efficient downsampler....

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

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...

Optimizing GPU occupancy and resource usage with large thread groups

Sebastian Aaltonen, co-founder of Second Order Ltd, talks about how to optimize GPU occupancy and resource usage of compute shaders that use large thread groups.

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...

Maxing Out GPU usage in nBodyGravity

Asynchronous compute can help you to get the maximum GPU usage. I’ll be explaining the details based on the nBodyGravity sample from Microsoft.

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

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!