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    AMD “Vega” 7nm Instruction Set Architecture documentation

    For most developers, it’s always worth understanding the instruction-level capabilities of any processor. Even though the instructions that get executed are usually hidden behind a …

    1 0 12/12/2019
    OCAT 1.6

    OCAT is our open source capture and analytics tool, designed to help game developers and performance analysts dig into the details of how the GPU presents …

    0 0 12/10/2019
    Vulkan Memory Allocator 2.3.0

    VMA (Vulkan Memory Allocator) is our single-header, MIT-licensed, C++ library for easily and efficiently managing memory allocation for your Vulkan® games and applications. One year …

    3 0 12/04/2019
    AGS SDK 5.4 improves handling of video memory reporting for APUs

    The AGS (AMD GPU Services) library provides game and application developers with the ability to query information about installed AMD GPUs and their driver, in …

    6 0 11/25/2019
    New Vulkan® Extensions in Driver 19.11.1

    Our latest Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition driver – 19.11.1 – was released on 4th November 2019. It comes packed with several useful Vulkan® extensions you …

    6 0 11/05/2019
    Beyond Spatial Audio: TrueAudio Next Acceleration of Steam Audio Sound Reflections with Third Order Ambisonics – Demo Video

    When creating state-of-the-art sound for a game or experience, many sound designers focus on accurate spatial 3D rendering of direct sound sources. Spatialized direct sound is important for realizing believable soundscapes that pull the player …

    6 0 10/21/2019
    Radeon™ GPU Analyzer 2.3 for Direct3D® 12 Graphics

    Earlier this year, RGA 2.2 shipped with a new mode of the command line tool that added support for Direct3D® 12 compute pipelines. RGA 2.3 …

    7 0 10/14/2019
    D3D12 Memory Allocator 1.0.0

    In July 2017 we released first public version of Vulkan Memory Allocator. Since then the library is in ongoing development, got few major releases, one …

    16 2 09/02/2019
    Discovering the structure of RDNA

    As the brilliant, tuned-in developer that you are, you are doubtlessly already aware that a little under a month ago AMD released its brand-spanking new …

    16 0 08/06/2019
    RDNA Shader Instruction Set Architecture document is now available

    This is a very short blog post to let everyone know that the RDNA Shader Instruction Set Architecture reference guide is now available. The document …

    14 4 08/02/2019
    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.6

    With this latest incarnation of RGP, we have added support for AMD’s new Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT ‘Navi’ graphics cards. Since this …

    6 0 07/29/2019
    Radeon Cauldron, the new SDK framework

    Today, we are excited to announce that we are releasing Cauldron 1.0. Cauldron is a framework for rapid prototyping that will be used in AMD …

    12 1 07/23/2019
    Radeon GPU Analyzer 2.2 for Direct3D®12 Compute

    Introduction Radeon GPU Analyzer (RGA) 2.2 introduces support for Direct3D 12 compute shaders in a new mode (-s dx12) of the command line tool. You …

    7 0 07/15/2019
    OCAT 1.5

    OCAT is our open source capture and analytics tool, designed to help game developers and performance analysts dig into the details of how the GPU …

    2 0 06/26/2019
    New Vulkan® Extensions in Driver 19.6.2

    On Monday 17th of June we released new version of our graphics driver – 19.6.2. With it we added support for 5 new Vulkan® extensions. …

    6 4 06/18/2019
    Using AMD FreeSync 2 HDR: Gamut Mapping

    Introduction This is part 3 of a series of posts on AMD FreeSync™ 2 HDR Technology (FreeSync 2 hereafter!). The first post covered color spaces …

    9 2 06/17/2019
    AMD at Digital Dragons and Vulkanised Conference

    The job of our worldwide developer technology engineers team is to directly help game developers to optimize their games, but also to educate developers by …

    6 0 06/05/2019
    Microsoft PIX Introduces AMD-Integrated Plug-In with High Frequency Counter Graph

    Microsoft® PIX is the premiere integrated performance tuning and debugging tool for Windows game developers using DirectX® 12. PIX can enable developers to debug and analyze …

    2 0 05/28/2019
    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.5.1

    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.5 We previewed the main RGP 1.5 features at GDC 2019 late last month, but didn’t set the release free because it …

    10 0 05/15/2019
    Using AMD Freesync 2 HDR: Tone Mapping

    Introduction This is part 2 of a series of posts on AMD FreeSync™ 2 HDR Technology (FreeSync 2 hereafter!). The first post covered color spaces …

    8 0 05/13/2019
    GDC 2019 Presentation Links

    If you weren’t able to attend GDC this year to catch the Advanced Graphics Techniques Tutorial Day and our Sponsored Sessions in person, or you …

    14 0 04/17/2019
    Using AMD FreeSync 2 HDR: Color Spaces

    Introduction This is going to be the first in a series of 4 blog posts covering different topics related to AMD FreeSync™ 2 HDR Technology …

    18 2 03/20/2019
    Radeon GPU Analyzer 2.1

    Radeon GPU Analyzer (RGA) is our offline compiler and integrated code analysis tool, supporting the high-level shading and kernel languages that are consumed by DirectX® …

    9 0 03/20/2019
    GDC 2019 Presentations

    San Francisco is the destination for the Game Developers Conference again in 2019, hosting our fine industry at the Moscone Center, March 19th to 23rd. …

    19 3 03/08/2019
    Vulkan Memory Allocator 2.2

    Introduction Vulkan Memory Allocator (VMA) is our single-header STB-like library for easily and efficiently managing memory allocation for your Vulkan games and applications. The last …

    12 0 12/18/2018
    Ryzen Threadripper for Game Development – optimising UE4 build times

    Foreword This is a guest post from Sebastian Aaltonen, co-founder of Second Order and previously senior rendering lead at Ubisoft®. Second Order published their first …

    14 0 12/17/2018
    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.4

    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.4 While the G in GPU stands for graphics, there are also popular SIMD programming models and associated APIs that map well …

    6 0 12/13/2018
    AMD GPU Services 5.3.0

    The AMD GPU Services (AGS) library provides game and application developers with the ability to query information about installed AMD GPUs and their driver, in …

    2 0 12/11/2018
    New Compressonator 3.1 SDK for seamless integration into asset toolchains – and more!

    We are excited to announce the release of Compressonator v3.1!  This version contains several new features and optimizations, including new installers for the SDK, CLI and …

    2 0 11/21/2018
    Optimize your engine using compute @ 4C Prague 2018

    Organised by the fine folks at Wargaming, the 4C conference was held in Prague over 2 days in early October this year, bringing attendees and …

    14 1 11/05/2018
    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.3.1

    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.3.1 RGP 1.3.1 is a hotfix release to keep compatibility with an upcoming Radeon Adrenalin Edition graphics driver. That driver descends from …

    7 0 10/11/2018
    Vulkan Memory Allocator 2.1

    Introduction We released Vulkan Memory Allocator 1.0 (VMA) back in July last year, but we’ve been remiss in posting about the progress of the library …

    8 1 09/10/2018
    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.3

    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.3 First, happy birthday to RGP! We released 1.0 publicly almost exactly a year ago at the time of writing, something I’ve …

    10 0 08/31/2018
    Decoding Radeon Vulkan versions

    There are traditionally just two hard problems in computer science — naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-1 errors — but I’ve long thought that there …

    9 2 08/02/2018
    Porting your engine to Vulkan or DX12

    Adam Sawicki, a member of AMD RTG’s Game Engineering team, has spent the best part of a year assisting one of the world’s biggest game …

    19 4 07/06/2018
    Understanding GPU context rolls

    If you’ve ever heard the term “context roll” in the context of AMD GPUs — I’ll do that a lot in this post, sorry in …

    23 3 06/29/2018
    Microsoft PIX Introduces AMD-Integrated Plug-In with Occupancy Data Graph

    Microsoft PIX is the premiere integrated performance tuning and debugging tool for Windows game developers using DirectX 12.  PIX enables developers to debug and analyze …

    3 0 06/26/2018
    GDC 2018 Presentation Links

    With GDC 2018 done and dusted, we thought it’d be valuable to reemphasise that all of the presented content from the Advanced Graphics Techniques Tutorial …

    6 0 06/07/2018
    AMD GPU Services 5.2.0

    The AMD GPU Services (AGS) library provides game and application developers with the ability to query information about installed AMD GPUs and their driver, in …

    6 0 05/31/2018
    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.2

    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.2 At GDC 2018 we talked about a new version of RGP that would interoperate with RenderDoc, allowing the two tools to …

    9 0 05/25/2018
    Compressonator V3.0 Release Brings Powerful New 3D Model Features

    Compressonator is a set of tools that allows artists and developers to work easily with compressed assets and easily visualize the quality impact of various …

    6 0 05/14/2018
    TrueAudio Next Version 1.2 Now Posted to Github

    We have posted the version 1.2 update to the TrueAudio Next open-source library to Github. It is available here. This update has a number of …

    11 2 05/10/2018
    Reducing Vulkan API call overhead

    Vulkan™ is designed to have significantly smaller CPU overhead compared to other APIs like OpenGL®. This is achieved by various means – the API is …

    28 0 04/26/2018
    First steps when implementing FP16

    Introduction 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 …

    12 0 04/20/2018
    GDC 2018 Presentation: Real-Time Ray-Tracing Techniques for Integration into Existing Renderers

    Real Time Ray Tracing was one of the hottest topics last week at GDC 2018. In this presentation, AMD Software Development Engineer and architect of Radeon …

    14 0 03/29/2018
    Real-Time Ray Tracing with Radeon ProRender

    The level of visual detail required of CAD models for the automotive industry or the most advanced film VFX requires a level of visual accuracy …

    33 4 03/20/2018
    GDC 2018 Presentations

    If you’re into the state of the art in games, especially real-time gaming graphics, your eyes will undoubtedly be on Moscone Center in San Francisco, …

    13 5 02/19/2018
    TrueAudio Next is Now Integrated into Steam Audio

    The long wait is over. The GPU processing power of TrueAudio Next (TAN) has now been integrated into Steam Audio from Valve (Beta 13 release). …

    8 3 02/09/2018
    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.1.1

    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.1.1 With GDC 2018 getting ever closer, we wanted to get one last minor release of RGP out before things get hectic …

    5 0 02/07/2018
    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.1.0

    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.1.0 It feels like just last week that we released Radeon GPU Profiler (RGP) 1.0.3 but my calendar says almost 2 months …

    20 0 12/12/2017
    Deferred Path Tracing By Enscape

    Insights from Enscape as to how they designed a renderer that produces path traced real time global illumination and can also converge to offline rendered image quality

    25 0 12/06/2017
    Compressonator V2.7 Release adds cross platform support and 3D Model compression with glTF v2.0

    We are excited to announce the release of Compressonator V2.7! This version contains several new features and optimizations, including: Cross Platform Support Due to popular demand, …

    5 1 11/27/2017
    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.0.3

    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.0.3 A couple of months on from the release of 1.0.2, we’ve fully baked and sliced 1.0.3 for your low-level DX12- and …

    11 0 10/18/2017
    AMD GPU Services 5.1.1

    The AMD GPU Services (AGS) library provides game and application developers with the ability to query information about installed AMD GPUs and their driver, in …

    7 1 09/27/2017
    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. …

    20 2 09/14/2017
    Stable barycentric coordinates

    The AMD GCN Vulkan extensions allow developers to get access to some additional functionalities offered by the GCN architecture which are not currently exposed in the Vulkan API. One of these is the ability to access the barycentric coordinates at the fragment-shader level.

    10 0 08/30/2017
    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.0.2

    Thanks (again!) Before we dive into a run over the release notes for the 1.0.2 release of Radeon GPU Profiler, we’d like to thank everyone …

    14 0 08/22/2017
    AMD Vega ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) documentation

    Understanding the instruction-level capabilities of any processor is a worthwhile endeavour for any developer writing code for it, even if the instructions that get executed …

    30 7 08/10/2017
    Understanding Vulkan objects

    An important part of learning the Vulkan API – just like any other API – is to understand what types of objects are defined in it, what they represent and how they relate to each other. To help with this, we’ve created a diagram that shows all of the Vulkan objects and some of their relationships, especially the order in which you create one from another.

    72 5 08/07/2017
    Open-source Radeon ProRender

    Summary In this blog post we are announcing the open-source availability of the Radeon™ ProRender renderer, an implementation of the Radeon ProRender API. We will give …

    26 1 07/30/2017
    Radeon GPU Profiler 1.0

    Introduction and thanks Effective GPU performance analysis is a more complex proposition for developers today than it ever has been, especially given developments in how …

    28 8 07/26/2017
    TressFX 4 Simulation Changes

    TressFX 4 introduces a number of improvements. This blog post focuses on three of these, all of which are tied to simulation: Bone-based skinning Signed distance …

    16 1 07/20/2017
    Vulkan Memory Allocator 1.0

    Full application control over GPU memory is one of the major differentiating features of the newer explicit graphics APIs such as Vulkan® and Direct3D® 12. …

    13 0 07/10/2017
    Compressonator V2.6 Release Adds HDR Tonemapping Compression, New Image Analysis Features

    We are excited to announce the release of Compressonator V2.6. This version contains several new features and optimizations, including: Adaptive Format Conversion for general transcoding operations …

    5 0 07/03/2017
    Vega Frontier : How to for developers

    When getting a new piece of hardware, the first step is to install the driver. You can see how to install them for the Radeon …

    4 0 06/29/2017
    Vega Frontier : How to install the driver

    In this blog we will go through the installation process of the driver for your new Radeon Vega Frontier card. We will go through the …

    6 5 06/29/2017
    Optimizing GPU occupancy and resource usage with large thread groups

    When using a compute shader, it is important to consider the impact of thread group size on performance. Limited register space, memory latency and SIMD occupancy each affect shader performance in different ways. This article discusses potential performance issues, and techniques and optimizations that can dramatically increase performance if correctly applied.

    66 7 05/24/2017
    DirectX12 Hardware Counter Profiling with Microsoft PIX and the AMD Plugin

    The AMD Developer Tools team is thrilled to announce the availability of the AMD plugin for Microsoft’s PIX for Windows tool. PIX is a performance …

    12 0 05/17/2017
    CodeXL 2.3 is released!

    A new version of the CodeXL open-source developer tool is out! Here are the major new features in this release: CPU Profiling Support for AMD …

    7 0 05/10/2017
    Content Creation Tools and Multi-GPU

    When it comes to multi-GPU (mGPU), most developers immediately think of complicated Crossfire setups with two or more GPUs and how to make their game …

    11 0 05/05/2017
    Capsaicin and Cream developer talks at GDC 2017

    Introduction Shortly after our Capsaicin and Cream event at GDC this year where we unveiled Radeon RX Vega, we hosted a developer-focused event designed to …

    6 0 04/05/2017
    Compressonator V2.5 Release Adds Enhanced HDR Support

     BC6 HDR Compression The BC6H codec has been improved and now offers better quality then previous releases, along with support for both 16 bit Half …

    6 0 03/29/2017
    Live VGPR Analysis with Radeon GPU Analyzer

    This article explains how to use Radeon GPU Analyzer (RGA) to produce a live VGPR analysis report for your shaders and kernels. Basic RGA usage …

    15 5 03/21/2017
    The Radeon Loom Stitching Pipeline

    I’m Mike Schmit, Director of Software Engineering with the Radeon Technologies Group at AMD. I’m leading the development of a new open-source 360-degree video-stitching framework …

    10 3 03/15/2017
    AMD LiquidVR MultiView Rendering in Serious Sam VR

    AMD LiquidVR MultiView Rendering in Serious Sam VR with the GPU Services (AGS) Library AMD’s MultiView Rendering feature reduces the number of duplicated object draw …

    10 1 02/27/2017
    TrueAudio Next Demo and Paper at GameSoundCon

    In 2016, AMD brought TrueAudio Next to GameSoundCon. GameSoundCon was held Sept 27-28 at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. GameSoundCon caters to game …

    7 2 02/24/2017
    Profiling video memory with Windows Performance Analyzer

    Budgeting, measuring and debugging video memory usage is essential for the successful release of game titles on Windows. As a developer, this can be efficiently achieved with the …

    13 1 02/09/2017
    GDC 2017 Presentations

    Another year, another Game Developer Conference! GDC is held earlier this year (27 February – 3 March 2017) which is leaving even less time for …

    16 5 02/01/2017
    AGS 5.0 – Shader Compiler Controls

    With the launch of AGS 5.0 developers now have access to the shader compiler control API.  Here’s a quick summary of the how and why…. Background …

    18 0 01/12/2017
    Optimizing Terrain Shadows

    There are many games out there taking place in vast environments. The basic building block of every environment is height-field based terrain – there’s no …

    12 2 12/15/2016
    Leveraging asynchronous queues for concurrent execution

    Understanding concurrency (and what breaks it) is extremely important when optimizing for modern GPUs. Modern APIs like DirectX® 12 or Vulkan™ provide the ability to …

    41 12 12/01/2016
    Selecting the Best Graphics Device to Run a 3D Intensive Application

    Summary Many Gaming and workstation laptops are available with both (1) integrated power saving and (2) discrete high performance graphics devices. Unfortunately, 3D intensive application …

    11 2 11/16/2016
    Vulkan and DOOM

    This post is taking a look at some of the interesting bits of helping id Software with their DOOM® Vulkan™ effort, from the perspective of …

    18 1 11/10/2016
    Implementing LiquidVR™ Affinity Multi-GPU support in Serious Sam VR

    This blog is guest authored by Croteam developer Karlo Jez and he will be giving us a detailed look at how Affinity Multi-GPU support was …

    13 1 10/31/2016
    AMD Driver Symbol Server

    When opening a 64-bit crash dump you will find that you will not necessarily get a sensible call stack. This is because 64-bit crash dumps …

    38 9 10/27/2016
    Vulkan barriers explained

    Vulkan™’s barrier system is unique as it not only requires you to provide what resources are transitioning, but also specify a source and destination pipeline …

    35 11 10/18/2016
    VDR Follow Up – Tonemapping for HDR Signals

    This is the third post in the follow up series to my prior GDC talk on Variable Dynamic Range. Prior posts covered dithering, today’s topic …

    11 0 10/05/2016
    Using RapidFire for Virtual Desktop and Cloud Gaming

    Virtual desktop infrastructure systems and cloud gaming are increasingly gaining popularity thanks to an ever more improved internet infrastructure. This gives more flexibility to the …

    10 0 09/27/2016
    AMD TrueAudio Next and CU Reservation – What is the Context?

    As noted in my previous blog, new innovations in virtual reality have spearheaded a renewed interest in audio processing, and many new as well as …

    28 0 09/26/2016
    Anatomy Of The Total War Engine: Part V

    This week marks the last in the series of our regular Warhammer Wednesday blog posts. We’d like to extent our thanks to Creative Assembly’s Lead …

    13 0 08/22/2016
    The Importance of Audio in VR

    Audio Must be Consistent With What You See Virtual reality demands a new way of thinking about audio processing. In the many years of history …

    11 8 08/16/2016
    Anatomy Of The Total War Engine: Part IV

    Happy Warhammer Wednesday! This week Creative Assembly’s Lead Graphics Programmer Tamas Rabel talks about how Total War: Warhammer utilized asynchronous compute to extract some extra …

    8 0 08/16/2016
    Anatomy Of The Total War Engine: Part III

    It’s Wednesday, so we’re continuing with our series on Total War: Warhammer. Here’s Tamas Rabel again with some juicy details about how Creative Assembly brought …

    16 2 08/10/2016
    Blazing CodeXL 2.2 is here!

    A new release of the CodeXL open-source developer tool is out! Here’s the hot new stuff in this release: New platforms support Support Linux systems …

    22 5 08/08/2016
    Anatomy Of The Total War Engine: Part II

    We’re back again on this fine Warhammer Wednesday with more from Tamas Rabel, Lead Graphics Programmer on the Total War series. In last week’s post …

    7 1 08/03/2016
    Anatomy Of The Total War Engine: Part I

    For the next few weeks we’ll be having a regular feature on GPUOpen that we’ve affectionately dubbed “Warhammer Wednesdays”. We’re extremely lucky to have Tamas Rabel, …

    13 10 07/27/2016
    Texel Shading

    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: object …

    25 3 07/21/2016
    Vulkan Device Memory

    EDIT: 2016/08/08 – Added section on Targeting Low-Memory GPUs This post serves as a guide on how to best use the various Memory Heaps and …

    41 2 07/21/2016
    Performance Tweets Series: Root signature & descriptor sets

    Before Direct3D® 12 and Vulkan™, resources were bound to shaders through a “slot” system. Some of you might remember when hardware did have only very …

    9 8 07/14/2016
    Performance Tweets Series: Multi-GPU

    Multi-GPU systems are much more common than you might think. Most of the time, when someone mentions mGPU, you think about high-end gaming machines with …

    14 2 07/05/2016
    Compressonator v2.3 Release Delivers ASTC, ETC2 Codec Support and GPU Rendered Image Views

    Compressonator is a set of tools to allow artists and developers to more easily create compressed texture image assets and easily visualize the quality impact …

    10 2 06/27/2016
    Performance Tweets Series: Debugging & Robustness

    Prior to explicit graphics APIs a lot of draw-time validation was performed to ensure that resources were synchronized and everything set up correctly. A side-effect of this robustness …

    6 0 06/22/2016
    Performance Tweets Series: Rendering and Optimizations

    Direct3D® 12 and Vulkan™ significantly reduce CPU overhead and provide new tools to better use the GPU. For instance, one common use case for the …

    4 0 06/14/2016
    Performance Tweets Series: Streaming & Memory Management

    As promised, we’re back and today I’m going to cover how to get resources to and from the GPU. In the last post, we learned …

    6 0 06/07/2016
    CodeXL 2.1 is out and Searing hot with Vulkan

    A new CodeXL release is out! For the first time the AMD Developer Tools group worked on this release on the CodeXL GitHub public repository, …

    20 0 05/31/2016
    ShadowFX Effect Library for DirectX 12

    Today, we are excited to announce that we are releasing an update for ShadowFX that adds support for DirectX® 12. Features Different shadowing modes Union of …

    13 1 05/26/2016
    Turbocharge your Graphics and GPU Compute Applications with GPUPerfAPI

    Achieving high performance from your Graphics or GPU Compute applications can sometimes be a difficult task. There are many things that a shader or kernel …

    15 3 05/25/2016
    GCN Shader Extensions for Direct3D and Vulkan

    The GCN architecture contains a lot of functionality in the shader cores which is not currently exposed in current APIs like Vulkan™ or Direct3D® 12. One …

    23 12 05/24/2016
    AMD DOPPEngine – Post Processing on Your Desktop in Practice

    A Complete Tool to Transform Your Desktop Appearance After introducing our Display Output Post Processing (DOPP) technology, we are introducing a new tool to change …

    37 0 05/23/2016
    Fast compaction with mbcnt

    Compaction is a basic building block of many algorithms – for instance, filtering out invisible triangles as seen in Optimizing the Graphics Pipeline with Compute. …

    15 8 05/20/2016
    TressFX 3.1

    We are releasing TressFX 3.1. Our biggest update in this release is a new order-independent transparency (OIT) option we call “ShortCut”. We’ve also addressed some of …

    10 4 05/19/2016
    GeometryFX 1.2 – Cluster Culling

    Today’s update for GeometryFX introduces cluster culling. Previously, GeometryFX worked on a per-triangle level only. With cluster culling, GeometryFX is able to reject large chunks …

    8 7 05/18/2016
    Unlock the Rasterizer with Out-of-Order Rasterization

    Full-speed, out-of-order rasterization If you’re familiar with graphics APIs, you’re certainly aware of the API ordering guarantees. At their core, these guarantees mean that if …

    17 6 05/17/2016
    AMD FireRays 2.0 – Open Sourcing and Customizing Ray Tracing for Efficient Hardware Platforms Support

    A New Milestone After the success of the first version, FireRays is moving to another major milestone. We are open sourcing the entire library which …

    31 2 05/16/2016
    Slides from our “The most common Vulkan mistakes” talk

    Last week, we organized a two hours-long talk at University of Lodz in Poland where we discussed the most common mistakes we come across in Vulkan applications. Dominik Witczak, …

    8 5 05/13/2016
    Compressonator (AMD Compress) is Going Open Source

    We are very pleased to be announcing that AMD is open-sourcing one of our most popular tools and SDKs.  Compressonator (previously released as AMD Compress …

    17 0 05/12/2016
    AMD Crossfire API

    Gaming at optimal performance and quality at high screen resolutions can sometimes be a demanding task for a single GPU. 4K monitors are becoming mainstream and gamers …

    19 5 05/05/2016
    AMD GPU Services, an introduction

    If you have supported Crossfire™ or Eyefinity™ in your previous titles, then you have probably already used our AMD GPU Services (AGS) library.  A lot of …

    17 1 04/28/2016
    Performance Tweets Series: Resource Creation

    Resource creation and management has changed dramatically in Direct3D® and Vulkan™ compared to previous APIs. In older APIs, memory is managed transparently by the driver. …

    9 0 04/20/2016
    CodeXL 2.0 is Here and Open Source

    CodeXL major release 2.0 is out! It is chock-full of new features and a drastic change in the CodeXL development model: CodeXL is now open …

    26 6 04/19/2016
    VDR Follow Up – Grain and Fine Details

    The prior post in this series established a base technique for adding grain, and now this post is going to look at very subtle changes to …

    3 0 04/13/2016
    Performance Tweets Series: Shaders, Threading, Compiling

    Welcome back to our performance & optimization series. Today, we’ll be looking more closely at shaders. On the surface, it may look as if they …

    12 1 04/06/2016
    VDR Follow Up – Fine Art of Film Grain

    This is the first of a series of posts expanding on the ideas presented at GDC in the Advanced Techniques and Optimization of VDR Color …

    8 1 04/04/2016
    GDC 2016 Presentations Available

    The Game Developer Conference 2016 was an event of epic proportions. Presentations, tutorials, round-tables, and the show floor are only one part of the story …

    9 2 03/30/2016
    GCN Memory Coalescing

    This post describes how GCN hardware coalesces memory operations to minimize traffic throughout the memory hierarchy. The post uses the term “invocation” to describe one …

    17 2 03/21/2016
    Delta Color Compression Overview

    Bandwidth is always a scarce resource on a GPU. On one hand, hardware has made dramatic improvements with the introduction of ever faster memory standards …

    26 13 03/14/2016
    Using the Vulkan™ Validation Layers

    Vulkan™ provides unprecedented control to developers over generating graphics and compute workloads for a wide range of hardware, from tiny embedded processors to high-end workstation GPUs with wildly different …

    45 6 03/09/2016
    GDC 2016 Presentations

    The Game Developer Conference 2016 (GDC16) is held March 14-18 in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is the most important event for game developers, …

    36 0 02/29/2016
    Performance Tweets series: Barriers, fences, synchronization

    Welcome back to our DX12 series! Let’s dive into one of the hottest topics right away: synchronization, that is, barriers and fences! Barriers A barrier is …

    15 1 02/22/2016
    Vulkan Renderpasses

    Vulkan™ is a high performance, low overhead graphics API designed to allow advanced applications to drive modern GPUs to their fullest capacity. Where traditional APIs …

    60 0 02/16/2016
    Say Hello to a New Rendering API in Town!

    Imagine that you were asked one day to design an API with bleeding-edge graphics hardware in mind. It would need to be as efficient as …

    45 3 02/16/2016
    Performance Tweets Series: Command lists

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    It’s Time to Open up the GPU

    Posted on January 26, 2016October 11, 2016 by Nicolas Thibieroz
    developer, GPUOpen, open source

    I have met enough game developers in my professional life to know that these guys are among the smartest people on the planet. Those particular individuals will go to extreme lengths to extract the last bit of performance or functionality from a computer system. Graphics engineers in particular are on a quest to bend the hardware to their will. Their passion, smarts and dedication has enabled successive waves of real-time graphics technology breakthroughs in console and PC game titles. To achieve these results, developers need to gain information about the hardware, use specific tools to analyze it and write efficient code to control it. More often than not, innovative results are only possible via the exchange of knowledge that happens within the game development community. While whole conferences are dedicated to this information sharing, it is often in more modest settings that inspiration takes form. Dinner conversations, plan files, developer forums or chats are common catalysts to graphics greatness.

    Yet there are hurdles getting in the way of productivity and innovation. It can be difficult for developers to leverage their R&D investment on both consoles and PC because of the disparity between the two platforms. 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. Triple monitor setups, 4K support or dual renders for VR rendering require vast amounts of GPU processing power yet brute force rendering only gets you so far. There is still a vast amount of graphics performance still untapped, and it’s time to explore smarter ways to intelligently render those increasing numbers of pixels. “Opening up” the GPU is how we solve this.

    GPUOpen marks the beginning of a new philosophy at AMD. It is the continuation of the initiative we started with Mantle where we embarked upon a journey to give game developers more efficient ways to drive the GPU. A couple of years later and the game development world is now rejoicing in the advent of standard and explicit graphics APIs such as Microsoft’s DirectX® 12 and Khronos’ Vulkan™. Now is time to do even more for developers.

    Today is the day we launch GPUOpen.

    GPUOpen is composed of two areas: Games & CGI for game graphics and content creation (which is the area I am involved with), and Professional Compute for high-performance GPU computing in professional applications.

    GPUOpen is based on three principles:

    GPUOpen_logoBWThe first is to provide code and documentation allowing PC developers to exert more control on the GPU. Current and upcoming GCN architectures (such as Polaris) include many features not exposed today in PC graphics APIs, and GPUOpen aims to empower developers with ways to leverage some of those features. In addition to generating quality or performance advantages such access will also enable easier porting from current-generation consoles (XBox One™ and PlayStation 4) to the PC platform.

    The second is a commitment to open source software. The game and graphics development community is an active hub of enthusiastic individuals who believe in the value of sharing knowledge. 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.

    The third is a collaborative engagement with the developer community. GPUOpen software is hosted on public source code repositories such as GitHub as a way to enable sharing and collaboration. Engineers from different functions will also regularly write blog posts about various GPU-related topics, game technologies or industry news.

    By Developers, For Developers

    A critical design goal was to have GPUOpen created by developers, for developers, keeping marketing elements to a minimum. The creation of the Radeon Technology Group led by Raja Koduri was key in turning GPUOpen into a reality and I am very excited that this project is now being launched.

    Today is the birth of GPUOpen and like any newborn it has some growing to do. As we add new content over the next few months we will be listening to developers feedback and respond as needed.

    It’s time to open up the GPU.

     

    Nicolas Thibieroz is the Director of Worldwide Game Engineering at AMD. Over the years, he and his team have helped countless numbers of PC game developers tame the GPU to make faster and better-looking games. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

    34 Comments

    Comment
    Jim T says:
    January 26, 2016 at 4:55 pm

    So I’m poking around GPUOpen.

    VERY VERY nice. There’s lot’s of stuff, lots of eye candy, very pretty, well implemented. The nav is a bit unusual, but within a minute I’m pretty comfortable with moving around the content.

    Here’s my biggest “WOW”. Every single thing I’ve looked at, in both Games and Compute, has a link to Github.

    THAT
    IS
    AWESOME

    Reply
    Tobias says:
    January 26, 2016 at 5:47 pm

    Great to hear! Can this mean better GFX drivers for Linux? Awesome!!! 😀

    Reply
    suchtie says:
    January 26, 2016 at 9:57 pm

    Quite likely. With proper documentation it will be much easier for open source driver developers to make a quality FOSS driver. I can even imagine voluntary devs joining forces with AMD devs to create a good FOSS driver. I’d love that.

    Reply
    Szilard says:
    January 26, 2016 at 5:53 pm

    Congrats and good luck with GPUOpen. Try to get the community behind you, there are plenty of folks unhappy or even pissed with the blue and green competition. Turning that to your advantage by supporting and helping people to help your cause (but not by trying to discredit others, please) should help in gathering momentum. And please, don’t forget that at this time you need developers behind you, users will only follow afterwards, so do support and enable developers first and foremost.

    Reply
    Shmerl says:
    January 26, 2016 at 8:03 pm

    It’s a great development, but a lot of libraries in GPUOpen are Windows only at present, because they rely on DX11 and etc. Are there any plans to port them to Vulkan to enable using them on Linux and other platforms outside MS ones?

    Reply
    Nicolas Thibieroz says:
    January 26, 2016 at 8:25 pm

    Vulkan is an efficient “explicit” graphics API and AMD is very excited about the potential it provides to get closer access to the GPU on different platforms. This API is an important part of our future plans.

    Reply
    Shmerl says:
    January 26, 2016 at 8:48 pm

    I’m talking about things like GeometryFX, TressFX and such (which are part of GPUOpen). Right now they don’t use Vulkan for their 3D and compute features. They rely on DX11 / DirectCompute, which makes it impossible to use them on Linux or any other system outside MS ones.

    What I’m asking is, if there is some (short / long term) plan to switch them from using MS proprietary APIs to cross platform and open APIs like Vulkan? That would make GPUOpen really open in all senses of the word.

    Reply
    Dustin Mays says:
    January 26, 2016 at 11:24 pm

    Are those APIs *necessary* in Vulkan? I’m not familiar with Vulkan’s public API, but that’s the first question I’d answer before pursuing this. It may be the case that the functionality you’re looking for is already surfaced in Vulkan, which would make these APIs redundant.

    Reply
    Shmerl says:
    January 27, 2016 at 1:36 am

    Those APIs are high level libraries for managing physics and other effects. Vulkan on the other hand is a low level API to access 3D and compute functionality of the GPU. I.e. they aren’t comparable. High level APIs are using the lower level ones. You don’t need to use something like GeometryFX, but if you need physics you’ll need to implement all that on your own in such case (or find an alternative like Bullet and etc.). Vulkan can be compared to OpenGL and OpenCL, not to high level stuff like TressFX and GeometryFX.

    Reply
    Nobody of Import says:
    January 27, 2016 at 6:31 pm

    Heh.. Just because they currently rely on DX11, doesn’t mean that they’re undoable- you’ll need to re-work them for OpenGL or Vulkan anyhow… Since they’re here (or, rather on GitHub under the GPUOpen banner…), it’s only a matter of someone being willing to DO that re-work…

    Reply
    Shmerl says:
    February 8, 2016 at 8:38 pm

    That was my point exactly. I was asking if such plans already exist, or not.

    Reply
    Stallman says:
    January 26, 2016 at 9:17 pm

    That’s awesome ! Thanks AMD for choosing altruism and free software 🙂
    Please could you port your direct x 11/12 features to Vulkan when it will be released ?
    And please accelerate the openCL development of Bullet the physics engine, this will give to AMD a better alternative than physx.
    That’s a priority.

    And another feature request, could you optimise this for GCN ? https://github.com/glennw/webrender
    This is the gpu part of servo, which is the layout engine of the future pushed by mozilla and Samsung. In end 2016, all browser will use it and if thanks to this optimisations AMD had better perf in browning than nvidia, this could be a game changer for AMD 😉

    Reply
    Philip says:
    January 26, 2016 at 11:39 pm

    Wow, good job on the new site AMD. Pretty good looking if you ask me…

    Reply
    AtomBIOS says:
    January 27, 2016 at 5:51 am

    So, is the source code for AtomBIOS being released then? Under Linux currently all AMD GPUs rely on binary blobs between the OSS driver and the hardware. It would be excellent to have a fully open source stack if you are now advertising a “commitment to open source”.

    Reply
    julian says:
    January 27, 2016 at 6:56 am

    good job AMD.

    Reply
    David Sucesso says:
    January 27, 2016 at 7:58 am

    i am amazed at your atitude. Will Benefith AMD in the long run… Nvidias aproach is allways proprietary stuff ( seems like apple but with graphics cards) Best of luck… i still use my amd 280x to my gamming needs and never disapoint 🙂 my oldie reliable hd5770 its now in a production pc and not on my home 🙂

    Reply
    Raj says:
    January 27, 2016 at 9:29 am

    What library are you using for scrolling on the mobile webpage? It’s very smooth.

    Reply
    Sh0X says:
    January 27, 2016 at 9:33 am

    Is there any way to use AMD GCN instruction set directly in OpenGL or DirectX shaders?.

    Reply
    Zijo says:
    January 27, 2016 at 11:01 am

    Can I implement this in Unity games?

    Reply
    Nicolas Thibieroz says:
    January 27, 2016 at 2:21 pm

    Yes. The MIT license is a permissive open source license.

    Reply
    Stallman says:
    January 27, 2016 at 3:08 pm

    Very beautiful site, but can you add the possibility to edit comments ?
    Also this would be great if the website was opensourced, people should report bugs and features (for exemple using piwik instead of Google analytics)

    Reply
    Daniel Moran says:
    January 27, 2016 at 4:12 pm

    Love the idea and while I’m going to be digging through the repos soon.

    One thing that I’ll mention here in addition to sending to Robert – releasing source is one thing, but for it to be a real open source ecosystem surely AMD has to consider that devs will also want to be able to submit suggestions for improvement, fixes, etc. Please consider something like Gerrit for this if not already in the works, it SURELY beats pull requests in Github.

    Reply
    Moschops says:
    January 27, 2016 at 5:32 pm

    “I have met enough game developers in my professional life to know that these guys are among the smartest people on the planet. ”

    Uh huh. I have met some very, very mediocre games developers in my time. Maybe we go to different conferences.

    Reply
    Hampus Sjöberg says:
    January 27, 2016 at 8:11 pm

    Very nice!
    So when are you open sourcing the GPU driver? Preferably for Linux.

    Reply
    Paul says:
    February 4, 2016 at 12:59 am

    E.g. https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Amdgpu

    Reply
    BDK says:
    January 27, 2016 at 10:22 pm

    I’m fairly hyped about this. Good things are coming folks, I just know it 🙂

    Reply
    Damir H. says:
    January 28, 2016 at 2:51 am

    Wait a second… TressFX 3.0 tells me that a “AMD Radeon™ GCN-based GPU (HD 7000 series or newer)” is a prerequisite. Does this mean it’s no longer cross-platform? Or is this just for authoring?

    Reply
    Nicolas Thibieroz says:
    June 27, 2016 at 2:12 pm

    TressFX 3 is compatible with other GPUs too. This is listed in the requirements.

    Reply
    sunsetquest says:
    February 1, 2016 at 5:07 am

    Any plans for Windows support on the GPUOpen Compute side? There are 5 tools listed and they are primarily for Linux:

    – HIP (Linux Only)
    – ContinuumAnalytics (Linux Only)
    – HC Compiler (Linux Only)
    – HSAILGDB (Linux Only)
    – SystemHealthMonitor (Primarily Linux, little support for Window)

    Reply
    Bob Ham says:
    February 1, 2016 at 9:41 am

    So if you’re opening up the GPU, will you be providing source code for the binary firmware files currently required by the free software drivers?

    Reply
    Stallman says:
    February 9, 2016 at 9:22 am

    Pls… It’s already provided since many years, and with the entire doc and ISA.
    Don’t confuse with the Nvidia jail

    Reply
    James says:
    February 12, 2016 at 3:13 am

    Finally, AMD realizes that opening up its hardware will improve its position in the market.

    When decisions are made to disregard the open source community it harms businesses more than they realize. The typical argument from major hardware vendors is that the open source community represents only a small share of the home user market and can therefore be disregarded. Power users such as developers, security professionals, and administrators typically employ open source software. Disenfranchising the power users who are the gatekeepers to purchasing decisions of families, friends, and businesses really hurts hardware vendors. For example, many years ago when I couldn’t get an ATI gpu to work on my thinkpad running linux. There were a lot of hacks but it never worked right. I said you know what, I’m not buying products from theses guys because they blew me off when I needed support.

    Since then I’ve probably owned a dozen computers in my home. I earned a bachelors degree in an IT discipline, I’m working on a masters, and I have several IT certifications. I now work in the IT sector. I make hardware purchasing decisions at work. Refusing to support me so I could get my GPU working has made me almost exclusively an intel buyer for about a decade.

    Does that mean that I am loyal to intel? Absolutely not. In fact, it is my hope that AMD will evaluate their position in the market and decide to open up its firmware because doing so would make their hardware more useful. You will also benefit from harnessing the brain power of your end users. Intel has been implicated in the snowden releases as surreptitiously implanting malicious microcode in its CPUs. The security community is looking at migrating away from AMD-64 to ARM and POWER8, which is silly because the architecture is fine but the corporate policies of secrecy keeping the products black boxes is incompatible with people concerned with their privacy.

    Reply
    gfx gamers says:
    July 17, 2016 at 8:25 pm

    Have you ever thought about including a little bit more than just your articles?
    I mean, what you say is important and all. Nevertheless think
    about if you added some great pictures or videos
    to give your posts more, “pop”! Your content is excellent but
    with images and videos, this site could certainly be one of the most beneficial in its field.

    Awesome blog!

    Reply
    Tenda Support Number says:
    July 9, 2018 at 5:58 pm

    we all know that the GPU is responsible for the computer graphics and handle the display and visualization of the system but form this article I get some wonderful information about the launch GPU open.

    Reply

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