AMD have announced their open-source (hosted on GitHub) alternative to Nvidia’s GameWorks today. It provides tools, graphical effects libraries and SDKs.
For more information, here are various articles about the announcement:
AMD Unleashes a New Era of Development with GPUOpen - AMD’s Youtube
AMD embraces open source to take on Nvidia’s GameWorks - Arstechnica
GPUOpen Will Give Game Developers Unprecedented GPU Control - LegitReviews
AMD GPUOpen: Doubling Down On Open-Source Development - tom’s HARDWARE
AMD’s Answer To Nvidia’s GameWorks, GPUOpen Announced – Open Source Tools, Graphics Effects, Libraries And SDKs - WCCF Tech
If you haven’t heard of GameWorks, it’s a set of innovative technologies that Nvidia has developed and provides to game developers to enable various effects in games. However there has been a lot of controversy as it is very closed source, developers have only been provided with the .dlls, making debugging much harder, and meaning that other hardware vendors cannot optimise their drivers to make the applications runs as fast as possible.
They have been accused of contractually forcing game developers into using many GameWorks features when they only wanted to use a small number, causing the applications to run much worse than they need to, in an attempt to make Nvidia GPUs perform better, especially at launch, than other vendors’ GPUs.
Furthermore, Nvidia have been accused of making developers using GameWorks features that will knowingly perform poorly on all vendors’ GPUs, but simply less poorly on Nvidia’s. An example is the tessellation in the Batman: Arkham series, Batman’s cape is tessellated to subpixel levels, but as Nvidia’s GPUs handle tessellation better than other vendors’, it looks good in Nvidia benchmarks, and sells Nvidia cards.
The technologies introduced by Nvidia’s GameWorks include:
AMD’s GPUOpen will introduce the following technologies:
Effects:
- TressFx 3.0
- GeometryFX
- AOFX
- ShadowFX
Tools:
- CodeXL static analyzer CLI
- CodeXL DX12 plugin
- Tootle (Triangle Order Optimization Tool)
Libraries and SDKs:
- AMD LiquidVR
- Firerays
- Rapid Fire
- AMD Compute Tools
- DX11 Services
- DX12 Services
- AMD Graphics Services
Most of the features from Nvidia’s GameWorks seem to have a parallel in AMD’s GPUOpen, and then a few more. The main advantage of GPUOpen is of course the Open Source nature of it, which circumvents all the issues and controversy that surrounded it. Hopefully GPUOpen will be able to work on Nvidia hardware, although Nvidia may not want to support it as it will undermine everything they have done with GameWorks, and give AMD an edge.
I posted this here as, while these technologies are made for DirectX 11 and 12, the open source nature may lead to a Vulkan and/or OpenGL port. Also, I have heard talk (perhaps incorrectly) that there are thoughts of a DX binding in LWJGL3, although I’d need Spasi to confirm and/or deny.
