There's no denying that AMD has released some very appealing graphics cards when it comes to price-performance, but there are still many areas to improve, including the quality of its drivers and the tools available to developers. That brings us to GPUOpen, an initiative seen as a direct answer to Nvidia's GameWorks, with the twist that every single component will be open source under the MIT license.
Taking on GameWorks
As we already know, AMD hardware can be found in the most important game consoles on the market. The adoption of x86 architecture gave developers significant advantages, but fundamental barriers still remain that affect the development dynamic between consoles and PCs. Add to that special optimizations that are not transferred from one hardware to another, due to proprietary elements like Nvidia's GameWorks middleware. GameWorks has a significant number of developers under its wing, but its restrictions are numerous, and AMD believes the best way to counter them is by offering anyone interested much more open tools. The result is GPUOpen.
What GPUOpen Offers
Direct access to the GPU, open source software and the creation of standards are the three main proposals of GPUOpen. The available resources will consist of the TressFX, GeometryFX, AOFX and ShadowFX effects, the CodeXL and Tootle tools, and at least four SDKs, accompanied by graphics services libraries and samples based on DirectX 11 and 12. All this content will be published on GitHub, and a dedicated portal will be added to facilitate access. At the same time, this portal will serve as a kind of blog with updated information for developers, and of course, anyone interested in following the evolution of GPUOpen.
MIT License: Everything Open
The best part is that every component of GPUOpen will be governed by an MIT license, known for its flexibility. Developers will not only be able to see the code of the tools up close, but also take that code and integrate it directly into their projects, whether proprietary or open source. In essence, GPUOpen is diametrically opposed to GameWorks. While Nvidia distributes closed libraries and imposes conditions on developers through contracts, GPUOpen puts almost everything in their hands. This should open a new stage for games with far superior performance on AMD hardware, both on Windows and Linux.
