GPUOpen

Getting started:

Our software

GPUOpen chip

Our talented engineering teams continue to innovate and develop critically-acclaimed and widely-used software products to help developers push the boundaries on what is possible with games and graphics applications.

With so many tools, SDKs, libraries, and effects available, if you’re new to GPUOpen, it’s not always easy to know where to start. This page is designed to be a helping hand to introduce you to what is available and point you in the right direction!

Note: GPUOpen also has an ever-increasing repository of documentation and videos, giving detailed support to developers in areas such as our hardware, programming, analysis, performance, and much more. We have a similar “getting started” page for this as well – why not take a look?

Jump to the section you need:

Tools

Our very popular Radeon Developer Tool Suite is a package containing several tools to help you analyze and optimize your graphics applications, and now includes ray tracing analysis.  With support for Windows and Linux, and DirectX and Vulkan, our tool suite is the right place to start when you need to look at performance.

You can find out more and download the tool suite from any of the pages linked below.

Radeon Raytracing Analyzer

Radeon™ Raytracing Analyzer

Radeon™ Raytracing Analyzer (RRA) is a tool which allows you to investigate the performance of your raytracing applications and highlight potential bottlenecks.

Radeon™ Memory Visualizer

Radeon™ Memory Visualizer (RMV) is a tool to allow you to gain a deep understanding of how your application uses memory for graphics resources.

AMD Radeon GPU Profiler

Radeon™ GPU Profiler

RGP gives you unprecedented, in-depth access to a GPU. Easily analyze graphics, async compute usage, event timing, pipeline stalls, barriers, bottlenecks, and other performance inefficiencies.

Radeon™ GPU Analyzer

Radeon GPU Analyzer is an offline compiler and performance analysis tool for DirectX®, Vulkan®, SPIR-V™, OpenGL® and OpenCL™.

These are not the only tools we provide. OCAT (for performance overlays) and Compressonator (for working with compressed assets) are also available through GPUOpen.

Videos

Our tools engineers frequently release videos to help developers get the most out of our tools. These are a great way to get started! Links to the slides can be found in the YouTube descriptions.

Presentations

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

We are continually developing our tools, and our tools engineers will write new blog posts with every significant new update, to help you get the most out of the latest features.

There are too many to list here, so head on over to find our tools blogs on our software blogs page.

SDKs and libraries

We have a wide variety of libraries available, ranging from SDKs to give you access to GPU hardware information, to libraries that help you to manage memory when developing with low-level APIs Vulkan and Direct3D. 

Besides the ones shown below, you can find lots more on our SDKs page.

AGS

AMD GPU Services (AGS) Library

The AMD GPU Services (AGS) library provides software developers with the ability to query AMD GPU software and hardware state information that is not normally available through standard operating systems or graphics APIs.

AMD GPU Performance API

GPUPerfAPI

GPUPerfAPI provides access to GPU Performance Counters. It analyzes performance and execution characteristics of applications using a Radeon™ GPU.

AMD GPUOpen Vulkan Memory Allocator

Vulkan® Memory Allocator

VMA is our single-header, MIT-licensed, C++ library for easily and efficiently managing memory allocation for your Vulkan® games and applications.

AMD GPUOpen Direct3D12 Memory Allocator (D3D12MA)

D3D12 Memory Allocator

The D3D12 Memory Allocator (D3D12MA) is a C++ library that provides a simple and easy-to-integrate API to help you allocate memory for DirectX®12 buffers and textures.

Blogs

To help you get the best out of our libraries, our engineers often write blogs to assist. There are far too many to list here, but you should take a look at the SDKs section on our software blogs page.

Effects

While AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution is currently our most widely-known effect, our FidelityFX library of technologies does not end with FSR!  

Now you can obtain all our FidelityFX technologies wrapped up in one easy-to-use package – the AMD FidelityFX SDK.

AMD FidelityFX SDK

AMD FidelityFX SDK

The AMD FidelityFX SDK is our easy-to-integrate solution for developers looking to include FidelityFX features into their games.

Here’s the current list of AMD FidelityFX technologies – and growing!

An image of a toy train blurring into the background

AMD FidelityFX Blur

AMD FidelityFX Blur is an AMD RDNA™ architecture optimized collection of blur kernels from 3×3 up to 21×21.

FidelityFX Lens - bar room

AMD FidelityFX Lens

AMD FidelityFX Lens is an AMD RDNA™ architecture optimized implementation of some of gaming’s most used post-processing effects.

Shadow Denoiser

AMD FidelityFX Denoiser

AMD FidelityFX Denoiser is a set of denoising compute shaders which remove artefacts from reflection and shadow rendering.

AMD FidelityFX Parallel Sort

AMD FidelityFX Parallel Sort

AMD FidelityFX Parallel Sort makes sorting data on the GPU quicker, and easier. Use our SM6.0 compute shaders to get your data in order.

Hybrid ray tracing

You don’t want to miss our hybrid ray tracing samples, also a part of the AMD FidelityFX SDK, which efficiently balance rasterization and ray tracing to help you maximise the impact of adding ray tracing to your games.

Cauldron framework

If you’re working with our effects, you’re going to need to know about Cauldron, our experimentation framework which you can use to try out our effects and also get started with your own development.

Radeon™ Cauldron Framework

Radeon Cauldron is our open-source experimentation framework for DirectX®12 and Vulkan®, provided in the AMD FidelityFX SDK.

glTFSample Cauldron Sample Project

This sample demonstrates how to use most of Cauldron’s features. It is also a useful reference for getting started with developing your own samples and prototypes.

And neither do our effects end with AMD FidelityFX – AMD TressFX is still widely used and developed, with plugins for popular engines.

TressFX

The TressFX library is AMD’s hair/fur rendering and simulation technology. TressFX is designed to use the GPU to simulate and render high-quality, realistic hair and fur.

Videos

Unsurprisingly, as our effects are so popular, we have a lot of videos produced by our engineers, often in collaboration with game developers where you can learn detailed information! Here are just some of our effects-related videos:

Blogs

While you can currently find the documentation for our effects packaged with them on GitHub, we’ve written a few handy blogs to guide you over on our software blogs page. These include guides on how to implement FidelityFX Super Resolution and TressFX in Unreal Engine.

Samples

We have compiled an ever-growing large library of samples to help you get started with our effects, DirectX®, Vulkan®, integrating our libraries, and much more.

Radeon ProRender and HIP

AMD Radeon™ ProRender is a powerful physically-based path traced rendering engine that enables creative professionals to produce photorealistic images. We have several SDKs associated with it, along with support for HIP.

AMD Radeon Rays

Radeon™ Rays

The lightweight accelerated ray intersection library for DirectX®12 and Vulkan®.

AMD Radeon ProRender SDK

AMD Radeon™ ProRender SDK

AMD Radeon™ ProRender SDK is a powerful physically-based path traced rendering engine that enables creative professionals to produce stunningly photorealistic images.

AMD Radeon Image Filter

Radeon™ Image Filtering Library

Harness the power of machine learning to enhance images with denoising, enabling your application to produce high quality images in a fraction of the time traditional denoising filters take.

AMD Orochi

Orochi

Orochi is a library which loads HIP and CUDA® APIs dynamically, allowing the user to switch APIs at runtime.

AMD HIP Ray Tracing

HIP Ray Tracing

HIP RT is a ray tracing library for HIP, making it easy to write ray tracing applications in HIP.

Videos

As well as videos on ProRender, we also have a video demonstrating how to use our very popular USD Hydra plugin for Blender.

Blogs

We keep developers regularly updated with what’s going on in the world of ProRender, HIP, and our associated plugins. There are too many to list here, but you can find them over on our software blogs page.

Tools not on GPUOpen

While we obviously recommend our own tools available here on GPUOpen, there are others you may also find useful, produced both by AMD and by third parties. Here’s a selection:

μProf

AMD μProf

AMD μProf is a software profiling analysis tool that provides event information unique to the AMD “Zen”-based processors and AMD INSTINCT™ MI Series accelerators. AMD μProf enables the developer to better understand the limiters of application performance and evaluate improvements.

RenderDoc

RenderDoc is a very popular free (MIT licensed) stand-alone graphics debugger. It provides straightforward single frame capture, and detailed examination of any application across a wide variety of APIs and platforms.

A screenshot showing the general layout of GPUView

Microsoft® GPUView

GPUView is a development tool that reads logged video and kernel events from an event trace log (.etl) file and presents the data graphically to the user.

Windows Performance Analyzer

Windows® Performance Analyzer (WPA)

WPA is included in the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK). It is a tool that creates graphs and data tables of Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) events that are recorded by Windows Performance Recorder (WPR), Xperf, or an assessment that is run in the Assessment Platform.

msft-pix

Microsoft® PIX

Microsoft PIX provides performance tuning and debugging for DirectX® 12 games on Windows®.

Blogs

We often give guidance on using some of these other tools in our performance guides and blogs. You can find some of the blogs here:

RenderDoc 1.8 has Compressonator support

When associated with DDS files, RenderDoc generates thumbnails for DDS formats and displays them in Windows Explorer. Compressonator Core provides functions for compressing and decompressing DDS files.

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.