AMD Counters GameWorks with GPUOpen, Leverages Open-Source

[Steevo]

This is a good news. But let's hope it's not just another AMD-Pixelux's Open Physic Initiative.

This has been exactly the kind of vaporware that AMD/ATI have been guilty of releasing, and you are right they need to build initiative for this new attempt by putting their money out there, or by just building more than the most rudimentary tools and then moving on to other pet projects.


Mantle was a significant change from their past attempts, as was TressFX, and frame control tech. I hope they continue, for their own sake, many of us have long memories and are tired of getting crapped on with their failed attempts.

 

[efikkan]

So most of it is nothing new, AMD is just dressing it up. "Direct access" to GPUs have been available through ADL for years.

Nvidia does also leverage open source, their Linux installer, setup utility(nvidia-settings), their CUDA compiler, GPU API and much more has been open source and available on Github for years.

 

[cdawall]

AMD has to do something useful their CPU market share has floundered into oblivion. At least they can float on GPU's while they take their collective heads out of their collective asses to fix the CPU's

 

[Basard]

I have no idea if this is a good or bad thing. On the face of it, looks positive. But if you consider some of the horrendous gfx glitches and problems some Gameworks titles have had, with Nvidia actively supporting, you have to think it needs a lot of support.
You could get some developers ramping in too many or conflicting effects without the required QC. Gameworks, laughably ironic, benefit is support in development, can AMD offer the same?
Regardless, I can see the draw for devs, given the hardware inside all consoles. Just hope its utilised well and if it is and it hamstrings Nvidia, well, that'll be an interesting 'poo storm'.

Support?! We don't need no stinking support!

 

[Patriot]

This is a good news. But let's hope it's not just another AMD-Pixelux's Open Physic Initiative.

To be fair... that was based on bullet physics... and when Intel bought that... It ended the initiative.
I would actually say that the idea was good enough it got sabotaged.

 

[okidna]

To be fair... that was based on bullet physics... and when Intel bought that... It ended the initiative.
I would actually say that the idea was good enough it got sabotaged.

I think you mean Havok, not Bullet because as far as I know nobody/no company bought Bullet.

Havok, on the other hand, has just been sold to Microsoft by Intel a couple months ago (October 2015).

 

[Relayer]

At least in most titles, you can turn the effects off. Or at least most of them. Batman and Witcher seemed to have options to kill them entirely. I'll probably do the same for AMD related effects.

With Gameworks typically optimizing is done by changing the renderer's code, rather than optimizing the Gameworks code. This means that even if you turn it off you are running through a renderer that is optimized for nVidia. GPUOpen will have complete open source and freedom to rewrite the code to optimize it for the renderer.