AMD has officially announced its alternative to Nvidia’s GameWorks: GPUOpen. Even more surprising is the fact that AMD is making its software open source. GPUOpen will include tools, graphic effects, libraries and SDKs for developers. This comes as good news for AMD fans who may have felt left out by the closed nature of Nvidia’s GameWorks.
AMD claimed that it is aiming to offer developers a set of tools and resources to enable further performance and graphical detail increase on GPUs. This will enable third party developers to create more complex and detailed worlds inside games. Besides that, the GPUOpen platform by AMD will also give PC enthusiasts the ability to further access the parallel engines that are included inside modern GPUs.
Part of what Nvidia offers in GameWorks is VisualFX (visual enhancements). It had plenty to offer like the recently showcased WaveWorks as well as HairWorks in The Witcher 3. Although there are several workarounds for AMD users to utilise Nvidia’s VisualFX, Nvidia were only releasing them with Nvidia users in mind. This basically means that Nvidia’s VisualFX runs better on Nvidia cards.
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AMD’s GPUOpen, on the other hand, offers the same set of visual enhancements while being open source. This means that GPUOpen will be usable across all platforms which includes Windows, DirectX as well as Linux. GPUOpen will include graphical tools, effects and SDKs such as TressFX 3.0, GeometryFX, AOFX (a type of ambient occlusion), ShadowFX, LiquidVR SDK, DirectX11 and 12 code samples and many more.
According to AMD, GPUOpen will be launching sometime in January through GitHub. GPUOpen can be seen as a complete opposite of GameWorks in terms of what it’s aimed for. With GPUOpen being open source, developers can take advantage of the provided tools to collectively move forward together instead on relying on a closed nature solution to provide the same set of tools. What this means for gamers is that they can look forward to seeing greater detail in games they play without being restricted by software and hardware type.
(Source: WCCFtech)
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