AMD's Answer to GameWorks: Open Source Tools, Graphics FX, Libraries and SDKs

http://wccftech.com/amds-answer-to-nvidias-gameworks-gpuopen-announced-open-source-tools-graphics-effects-and-libraries/

by altern8 • 11 years ago

164 70 11 years ago

wccftech.com

taspeotis• 11 years ago

Last time I checked AMD was losing something like $200MM a quarter with around $750MM cash on hand. So they could be out of money in a year.

NVIDIA isn't exactly losing this race ... why not just lock yourself in to GameWorks?

sspiff• 11 years ago

Well, there's the case for other platforms than PC.

Also, maybe if you are a major studio who will with certainty release your game within 18 months, perhaps you should. But if you invest heavily and lock yourself to a specific SDK of a single vendor, you better hope the SDK survives and remains relevant.

akerro3• 11 years ago

So it is time to buy new CPU and GPU?

creshal8• 11 years ago

AMD's finances have been miserable for ten years, and they always managed to find new investors.

driverdan• 11 years ago

Do you think your CPU and GPU will stop working if they go out of business?

creshal8• 11 years ago

Assuming AMD runs out of money tomorrow, we'd still have an installed base of 50 or 60 million XBox Ones, PlayStation 4s and Wii Us that make use of AMD GPUs, together with a 25% market share on computers.

why not just lock yourself in to GameWorks?

Because only Nvidia users benefit of it, which manages barely 55% of the PC market share – everything else is dominated by AMD or Intel (or, in the case of handhelds, various other companies).

tankenmate4• 11 years ago

And in the long run if Nvidia dominates the market even Nvidia users won't benefit (or won't benefit as much as they could have).

VT_Drew• 11 years ago

NVIDIA isn't exactly losing this race

Because AMD has been putting out great cards the past few months, completely revamped their their driver software. Meanwhile NVIDIA has been doing not much of anything. The latest reports have shown AMD regaining market share in discrete CPU's and this trend will most likely continue. AMD has ZEN coming out next year, and they will probably be profitable again by the end of 2016. AMD isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

andromeduck2• 11 years ago

reskin not revamp

herbst4• 11 years ago

Thats exactly why i buy AMD cards over Nvidia again and again. Who cares about super fancy graphics and yet another, 2% faster shader. Want i want is properly supported Hardware with working Open Source drivers from a company that has interest in its users hacking their own solutions, even when they get better than their properitary ones.

creshal8• 11 years ago

And yet, 10 years ago the situation was exactly reversed, with ATi sabotaging early DirectX 9 to run worse on Nvidia cards, and ATi pushing a huge pile of proprietary solutions nobody ended up caring about – like TruForm (ATi brand tessellation) or Close-to-Metal (predecessor to Nvidia's CUDA, only when that proved more successful did ATi switch to pushing OpenCL).

Brand loyalty is useless, because brands don't care about consumers.

ant6n3• 11 years ago

AMD is so far behind at this point that it will take many years before they can leverage a strong market position to try to push some proprietary solution. If they survive at all.

drzaiusapelord• 11 years ago

This seems unfair considering ATI was bought by AMD and now has completely different leadership. The recent moves towards FOSS are pretty much post AMD buyout.

unholythree• 11 years ago

I agree, at the moment I use mostly AMD at home [i]because[/i] the lower end server processors I can afford don't have the feature sets gimped like Intel, and their consumer GPUs support IOMMU passthrough that NVIDIA needlessly restricts to professional cards.

It may only be their weak market share that inspires their generosity, but it's hooked me and certainly has me rooting for their continued existence.

krcz• 11 years ago

Unfortunately that is something regular non-dev user doesn't care about much. And such users make most of the customers.

I can only hope that Vulkan will change the game a little bit, so shader hacking won't affect perceived performance that much.

tenfingers3• 11 years ago

How does the current AMD driver fare in linux land?

Two years ago I was working on a large GL project, and basically the only workable drivers were either intel, or nvidia. With nvidia being far better off pretty much anything, from driver quality to debugging tools.

I'm using an HD4400 on my primary laptop, mostly to have a low-end system for performance tuning. While everybody says that intel should be one of the best supported OSS drivers (if not the only), the i915 driver constantly breaks with a million of little issues which are fixed in one release of the driver and broken again on the next. In the end, all these issues pop up in the wild, where I cannot even restrict users to a single driver version (because many times issues are chipset-specific).

Despite whatever I read here, over and over again, the nvidia driver has always been rock-solid for me, with intel being at least on par, and AMD being not even remotely comparable.

I had generally harder times with intel even, due to unpredictable gpu stalls. Even when it comes to power management, the latest i915 driver fails to come back from suspend.

I really want to switch to something higher quality and OSS, so I'm hoping AMD steps up the game.

I do not need another half-assed driver like i915.

anon4• 11 years ago

The first and last time I bought an ATI card was in 2003. In the 12 years since then, the drivers have become a little bit more stable and support the newer OpenGL interfaces. They continue to be light years behind nVidia.

dmm• 11 years ago

AMD has excellent in-mainline-kernel drivers that work out of the box. It's much better, if not quite as fast, as the proprietary catalyst drivers.

Glyptodon• 11 years ago

I've been using an AMD card for years now. It's stable, works fine for every day use without problem. I'm particularly fond of the fact that the installer itself builds distro-specific packages for installation (deb, rpm, etc.). That said nVidia does outperform, especially in games. And if you don't play games the open source AMD drivers are almost good enough to make the proprietary driver unnecessary.

rsp1984• 11 years ago

This a thousand times. In our company we have a lot of experience with various graphics chips and drivers (especially mobile). From our experience NVIDIA is the only company that delivers rock solid drivers across the board. Everything else is half-baked at best.

I can also confirm the GPU stalling on Intel.

Even though other chips perform ok in the benchmarks and some AAA games, when it comes to less popular 3D apps/games or writing own graphics code NVIDIA just eats its competition for breakfast. We sometimes get better GL performance out of a 2 year old Tegra4 than out of everything that the competition offers today. And this is entirely down to drivers, not because the Tegra4 is such an advanced chip. Not even talking about the K1 or X1 here which are different levels entirely.

Edit: inserted a "not"

herbst4• 11 years ago

Years ago i had issues on mass and would have said the very same (without the open source part) about nvidia as they just worked better. Today most linux based operating systems already ship the open source ATI drivers which is good enough (sometimes even better) for most.

Thaxll• 11 years ago

2% faster haha, you don't play any games do you? Nvidia cards are much faster than AMD since a while now.

PeCaN2• 11 years ago

Hardly? Last generation the 290x was easily competitive with the 780 Ti, particularly at higher resolution.

This generation the Fury and Fury X aren't quite as good as the 980 Ti (turns out Maxwell is really good) but aren't bad either.

I like AMD, but CUDA >>> OpenCL, so for any scientific computing Nvidia is the way to go. For gaming the 970, 980, and 980 Ti are too good this time around. AMD isn't far behind however, and next generation could easily flip things around.

rfrank• 11 years ago

Maybe if you're in the market for a Titan X or something, but the R9 Fury and 390 are both great cards for their price point. Performance will also be impacted by nvidia software like hairworks and God rays.

pizza2342• 11 years ago

That's wrong. They have, for the majority of cards, a much higher performance-per-watt ratio, which is a different thing.

herbst4• 11 years ago

Thats simply wrong. See i dont game. I do casual cryptocoin maning, generating Hashes, cracking hashes, ... AMD is MUCH superior in all these cases.

People always assume only Gamer care about recent hardware.

pizza2342• 11 years ago

Well, unfortunately, while the idea is admirable, with the current designs, for the majority of the cards, nVidia cards are consuming ~60% of the AMD direct competitors, which is very significant.

sevensor3• 11 years ago

Sometimes, the free market does something that really impresses me. This is one of those times. Here we have AMD releasing open source tools in an attempt to beat a competitor whose hardware is technically superior. Sure, this seems like a desparate measure from a company that's lost its way and will try anything to make a buck. And it's probably motivated by a desire to generate lock-in for their hardware. But that's capitalism!

SXX4• 11 years ago

    > And it's probably motivated by a desire to generate lock-in for their hardware.

I don't see how MIT licensed code can generate lock-in for AMD hardware. Would you care to elaborate?

sevensor3• 11 years ago

Perhaps I'm misreading it, but the announcement seemed to imply that the source code, however open, is for AMD hardware. So by open-sourcing it, they attempt to generate lock-in to the hardware, which is still just as proprietary as can be. In other words, I don't think that these tools will work on your NVidia GPU. Or not well, at any rate.

oxide• 11 years ago

AMD has consistently impressed me with stuff like this, definitely going AMD this time when it's time to upgrade the ol' GPU. Nvidia be damned.

rasz_pl• 11 years ago

AMD is very badly mismanaged. Ever since K8 engineering is again perceived as a source of cost. They lost $400mil on failed ARM servers idea without blinking an eye, but plain refuse to fund proper software support for their products because that would cost like 30-40 engineer salaries! :(.

AMD is Commodore of this decade.

omarshaikh• 11 years ago

Looks like another attempt at grabbing a share from NVidia's CUDA ecosystem... Not gonna happen.

singularity2001• 11 years ago

They better get into deep learning territory quicker!

autobahn• 11 years ago

AMD also released FreeSync, an open alternative to Gsync, a dynamic refresh-rate interface for monitors. The Nvidia version requires nvidia hardware and licensing and adds significant cost to the monitor, whereas freesync can be implemented in the control boards that already exist for the monitors, and without cost.

I think they're both great graphics cards, but NVidia tries its best to stifle competition.

BuckRogers2• 11 years ago

NV lost their bet on Gsync, it's just not apparant yet. Intel announced they're adopting the tech behind Freesync for their own IGPs. Gsync won't hold up against Intel Kabylake's IGP + AMDs APUs and GPUs.

If the trend continues of Intel adopting AMD's open standard / libre alternatives to NV's tech, I'm not sure how NV can seriously stand against AMD + Intel using the same solutions. Intel IGPs are only going to get better and better and be more relevant over time, Broadwell Iris Pro was already impressive and Kabylake intends to take that to the next level.

Diwoto• 11 years ago

I'm all for AMD going open source with these tools (I love the fact they're doing this) but the reason that developers go with GameWorks in the first place is because Nvidia is able to allocate staff/resources to the game studios to assist in implementing.

SXX4• 11 years ago

Considering how bad GameWorks features perform in many PC games (e.g in some Ubisoft titles Nvidia-only features was dropped after release within first patches) this strategy doesn't work.

Though I only heard good things about Nvidia OpenGL developers support and as far as I know they do support even devs who isn't part of "Meant to be Played" thingy. So I suppose many studios that don't even use Nvidia-only features prefer their middleware because of support.

Sadly AMD is opposite and developers support for OpenGL just not exist. E.g you can send them emails, tickets and there won't be answer for months.

AMD's Answer to GameWorks: Open Source Tools, Graphics FX, Libraries and SDKs

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