AMD’s graphics division have just announced a new initiative that’ll mean the company releases its drivers and developer tools under open source licenses, similar to NVIDIA’s Gameworks. Named GPUOpen, it appears an attempt on AMD’s part to get developers onside, since one of the company’s current problems as many see it is that Gameworks has given devs greater fluency coding for NVIDIA hardware, resulting in better-optimised games for Team Green. GPUOpen then, may be AMD’s counterpunch.
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Among the dev tools to be released in an open source state are the TressFX hair modelling tech, AMD’s LiquidVR virtual reality platform, and their library of DirectX code samples.
Taking TressFX as an example, currently most games support either this or NVIDIA’s Hairworks – supporting both is a lot of work. By open-sourcing it, AMD hope for a wider adoption rate in future titles. The future’s looking extremely hirsute for gamers, either way.
AMD have made their dev tools publicly available before, but this new GPUOpen initiative redefines the license – a permissive MIT license, specifically. This means developers have access to each tool’s source code and play around with it, then repack it so other developers can enjoy a new and improved iteration of it.
Here’s the full list of tools available in the GPUOpen initiative:
TressFX 3.0
GeometryFX
AOFX
ShadowFX
CodeXL CLI
CodeXL DirectX 12 plug-in
Tootle
Liquid VR
Firerays
FireRender
RapidFire
AMD Compute Tools
AMD Graphics Services software development kits
DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 code samples.
Thanks, Ars Technica.