AMD’s Answer To Nvidia’s GameWorks, GPUOpen Announced – Open Source Tools, Graphics Effects, Libraries And SDKs

[Sammael]

Seems like it has more potential than Gameworks right now. We could probably see studios arise that are solely focused on starting with those solutions, create a better effect or whatnot, and then sell them. I'm pretty sure there are far better teams that could be working on providing libraries of visuals effects than just AMD and Nvidia. The real question will be whether any company is willing to invest in creating those libraries and if those companies decide to sell them to others.

 

 

Part of the potential is that it would be incredibly useful to the entire industry to have a ready made suite of graphical effects that are cross platform and open to modification and tweaks.  

 

Gameworks is a suite of effects but far more locked down and focused on their own hardware.  Some people may say, who gives an F, they have the most marketshare in the pc space, but that is not the entire universe.

 

 

You know who sells more gpus than nvidia and amd combined?

 

qualcomm and samsung with exynos

 

They each have graphics on die on their chips, android is a mainstay of those chips and android is adopting vulkan, vulkan would probably be able to tap into this platform for effects that scaled to mobile and that expertise could transfer to the pc on a larger scale as well.

 

Wouldn't it be great to have an effective physics suite or lighting suite that could transfer between mobile and consoles and the pc and tweaked as needed?

 

 

Patrick thinks this is doomed to failure as dedicated teams are seen as more effective than this open hipster everyone contributes paradigm, and he may be right, but let's hope that his darth vader like vision of the future dies.

[Coaxialgamer]

Great ...Now amd gets to fuck their competitors with proprietary features that don't work well on nvidia cards.

[JerkyMcDilerino]

Let the battle begin!

[Ekpyrosis]

so far only panned out for Freesync....which was already part of VESA standards. 

I don't get your point. It became a VESA standard after AMD proposed it as such. 

[Sammael]

Great ...Now amd gets to fuck their competitors with proprietary features that don't work well on nvidia cards.

 

 

Wrong.  If this actually works this will be what gameworks was never meant to be, a suite of tools and middleware of advanced rendering effects that is more cross platform and optimizable.  Both AMD/nvidia/qualcomm/samsung/intel could delve into the code openly, along with the game devs and make tweaks to get the best effect on their chosen hardware software.  More than that, if they saw that a certain setting was overboard they could alter the software stack to say, lessen the tessellation levels or use a different technique altogether to better match given hardware.

 

This is potentially a graphical middle ware solution that was meant to be, think Saruman and Gandalf.  There was a line after Gandalf was anointed to become Gandalf the White where he says...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl2R4v9YvEA#t=1m50s

 

That is more of the clip but the money quote comes after 2:45, where after being mistaken for Saruman, Galdalf says:   I am Saruman, or rather Saruman as he should have been.

[Castdeath97]

At least it's not called

FreeGPU.

 

Ahaha, get it?

 

The controversy surrounding Gameworks is rather a symptom of another problem : greedy game publishers who rush their dev teams.

Maybe GameFury?

.....

.....

Yeah I should remain silent....

[samcool55]

They should call it GameThatWorks 

no....

....

Well k ignore this then, move on! Nothing to see here!

 

Anyway, i'm happy to see AMD doing this. This is how it should be done. Open, transparent and no room to complain.

U no like? Fix it then, you can, do it yourself. You have that option.

[niofalpha]

Just like mantle was open source right?

If they can't do what game works does and send engineers to work on games then it's not gonna go well.

And that name is horrible.

[HalGameGuru]

All I could think of when I saw this was now AMD can go whole hog into PGA sponsorship.

 

"And in this years GPUOpen will Tiger take home the Fury X or will Mickelson tame the Tiger?!"

LIVE STREAMED ON TWITCH and NBC at 1PM SUNDAY!

 

OT: I like the move, but it feels kind of desperate, grasping at straws, kinda thing. I hope it does well, part and parcel with VULKAN/DX12, better all around performance and more interesting future endeavors. But, you have to get third parties involved, especially devs... can it happen...

[HalGameGuru]

Just like mantle was open source right?

If they can't do what game works does and send engineers to work on games then it's not gonna go well.

And that name is horrible.

With open source any third party could develop support engineers and contract out for such optimization and consultation. It just takes people willing to do it.

[niofalpha]

With open source any third party could develop support engineers and contract out for such optimization and consultation. It just takes people willing to do it.

But are they going to actively send them out to all the game studios, trained in doing such like Nvidia does?

AMD can't exactly afford to do so...

[Godlygamer23]

What if they called it "GamesActuallyWork"?

[HalGameGuru]

But are they going to actively send them out to all the game studios, trained in doing such like Nvidia does?

AMD can't exactly afford to do so...

 My whole point is with open source AMD isn't the one that has to do it, any company can provide that kind of support.

[niofalpha]

 My whole point is with open source AMD isn't the one that has to do it, any company can provide that kind of support.

Why would an outside company support AMD's when they could make there own?

 

And I'm still doubtful it'll be "open source" like Mantle, or actually open source.

[HalGameGuru]

When they could make their own what? We're talking about someone trained, experienced, and knowledgeable of the GPUOpen system, going to devs or vendors to provide support and optimization of GPU Open code and API implementations. Third parties would be the best to provide such support, they could be vendor and platform agnostic and paid by the dev for services rendered rather than provided by platform suppliers causing questions of bias.

[Lethal Seraph]

I agree with you, but why would AMD create such a profitless initiative if it would help the competition? Do you think they are doing it for just plain marketing?

I wouldn't say profitless. Their actually the leader in new tech, which tries to get everyone on board for the benefit of all. Meanwhile, the other team gradually and eventually adapt to the new stuff, and squeezing AMD at the same time. Most people don't know AMD as the good guys.

[MoonSpot]

What if they called it "GamesActuallyWork"?

[stream]http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/valkyria/images/7/73/VC_Elysse_Potential1.ogg/revision/latest?cb=20141217162240[/stream]

 

@Slick is your PhpBB broken?  No audio loven goin' on ;(

[Paranoid Kami]

 

 

 

Firaxis

Rebellion

Oxide

Eidos-Montreal

[dragosudeki]

what volvo is doing is basically sticking their heads in the sand and saying nope there is no problem with our cars and we are not going to fix it and you are saying that is the correct thing to do

There's really nothing wrong with volvo not wanting people sticking heads in their stuff. Oracle (a company that actually seems to embrace open source solutions) has also been reported to also not like their customers trying to find flaws in their code either...

 

 

Q. What does Oracle do if there is an actual security vulnerability?

 

A. I almost hate to answer this question because I want to reiterate that customers Should Not and Must Not reverse engineer our code. However, if there is an actual security vulnerability, we will fix it. We may not like how it was found but we aren’t going to ignore a real problem – that would be a disservice to our customers. We will, however, fix it to protect all our customers, meaning everybody will get the fix at the same time. However, we will not give a customer reporting such an issue (that they found through reverse engineering) a special (one-off) patch for the problem. We will also not provide credit in any advisories we might issue. You can’t really expect us to say “thank you for breaking the license agreement.”

Source: http://gizmodo.com/oracle-deleted-its-insane-rant-against-security-hackers-1723388977

 

Companies not wanting people to get into their software is really nothing new and its neither good, nor a bad thing.

[spartaman64]

There's really nothing wrong with volvo not wanting people sticking heads in their stuff. Oracle (a company that actually seems to embrace open source solutions) has also been reported to also not like their customers trying to find flaws in their code either...

Source: http://gizmodo.com/oracle-deleted-its-insane-rant-against-security-hackers-1723388977

Companies not wanting people to get into their software is really nothing new and its neither good, nor a bad thing.

You know that oracle is one of the worst company when it comes to security

[Samfisher]

Mantle wasnt abandoned it finished dx12 and it was given to the khronos group.

Vesa standard is Adaptive sync jointly developed by amd. Freesync is an amd standard.

Mantle did nothing for DX12.  If you think Mantle in any way shape or form influenced the creation of DX12, you have no idea how long something like a completely new DX API takes to make.

 

Adaptive Sync is an OPTIONAL VESA Standard.  It's not a requirement for HDMI/DP to include support it to be certified.

[AlwaysFSX]

If they can pull it off, I'll switch to Radeon cards in a heartbeat because this could potentially mean community performance fixes or better/easier effect mods.

Yeah then you can either have it go one of two ways. A terribly long vetting process by AMD to see if the code actually does as intended or having people shame AMD because they can't even get their own shit to work right (and still have broken drives).

 

People bitch about GameWorks but GameWorks isn't the problem. It probably wouldn't have come about if developers for games and engines actually did something right for once instead of putting a thousand band-aids on code and design. Seriously, physics isn't hard to model because you can make a lattice of the material and just follow actual math for physics. It's not like we don't know how water works down to scales that we don't need to render. Engine developers would rather Frankenstein something in created by someone else instead of developing in in-house and game developers would rather use a Frankenstein'd engine and Frankenstein their work into the  damn thing further to suit their needs and take short cuts to rush their already broken product. If you have several layers of failure you shouldn't expect anything more than rubbish with a shiny bow on top.

 

You can't blame Nvidia and you can't blame AMD. They're both just trying to prevent as many problems down the line as they can. Unfortunately it doesn't exactly work out as well in practice as it does in theory.

 

Will this work? I doubt it. Maybe it'll make Nvidia scold devs to stop breaking their tech and implement it properly but who knows.

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

If they can pull it off, I'll switch to Radeon cards in a heartbeat because this could potentially mean community performance fixes or better/easier effect mods.

 

 

GPUOpen sounds way better than "FreeSync".

 

If the community is anything like the Modding community. It may stay alive. 

[spartaman64]

Open source huh? More like slow development to me. Why waste money developing this standard when you can wait for someone else to do that and then adopt it. Not to mention the fragmentation that occurs since everyone will want to develop it slightly differently to suit their own needs.

So Linus torvalds is lazy and cheap and wants other people to do stuff for him

[patrickjp93]

Yeah then you can either have it go one of two ways. A terribly long vetting process by AMD to see if the code actually does as intended or having people shame AMD because they can't even get their own shit to work right (and still have broken drives).

 

People bitch about GameWorks but GameWorks isn't the problem. It probably wouldn't have come about if developers for games and engines actually did something right for once instead of putting a thousand band-aids on code and design. Seriously, physics isn't hard to model because you can make a lattice of the material and just follow actual math for physics. It's not like we don't know how water works down to scales that we don't need to render. Engine developers would rather Frankenstein something in created by someone else instead of developing in in-house and game developers would rather use a Frankenstein'd engine and Frankenstein their work into the  damn thing further to suit their needs and take short cuts to rush their already broken product. If you have several layers of failure you shouldn't expect anything more than rubbish with a shiny bow on top.

 

You can't blame Nvidia and you can't blame AMD. They're both just trying to prevent as many problems down the line as they can. Unfortunately it doesn't exactly work out as well in practice as it does in theory.

 

Will this work? I doubt it. Maybe it'll make Nvidia scold devs to stop breaking their tech and implement it properly but who knows.

#TheTruth

 

As a computer scientist, yes, so, much, yes...