AMD is taking a bold step in the direction of opening up its GPU technology. The company has launched GPUOpen, a program that aims to offer code and documentation for developers.
With the initiative, the Sunnyvale-based company shows its commitment to the community of developers. It also demonstrates that it understands the correlation between open source and improved software and hardware performance.
What GPUOpen will offer is a myriad of resources for developers. With them, coders will be able to pull better results from low-grade PC video cards, port apps and have an ensemble picture of how GPUs work. Many technical details regarding the inner workings of a graphics card are known only to the manufacturer, and AMD acknowledges that this must stop.
"GPUOpen marks the beginning of a new philosophy at AMD. It is the continuation of the initiative we started with Mantle where we embarked upon a journey to give game developers more efficient ways to drive the GPU," Nicolas Thibieroz, senior manager at AMD, said.
If the project goes as planned, games will extract better performance from the current hardware specs, leading to a substantially improved visual quality.
Thibieroz underlines that there is "a vast amount of graphics performance still untapped," and AMD is highly motivated to find smarter ways to render the ever growing number of pixels.
GPUOpen features two sectors: Games & CGI, which oversees the content creation and game graphics, and Professional Compute, which handles high-end GPU computing problems in professional applications.
Thibieroz notes that there are three principles that constitute the mainframe of GPUOpen:
1. Providing code and documentation that puts PC developers more in control of the graphics card.
2. Promoting open source material, which fuels the enthusiasm of the talented community that believes in shared knowledge.
3. Engaging the community of developers in a collaborative way, as more minds think better than one.
AMD hints that the initiative will address multiple platforms.
It should be mentioned that the company has some pragmatic reasons to launch the GPUOpen. The manufacturer faces stiff competition in the high-end graphics card sector, where Nvidia rules supreme. On the other end of the spectrum, AMD is fighting a losing battle with Intel, who reigns over the integrated graphics for some time now.
It might be that GPUOpen is AMD's way to attract developers and raise the value of its products, which could have a chance to win the middle segment of the graphics card market.
Late last year, information surfaced indicating that AMD is preparing an offer that is hard to refuse. According to the report, AMD is set to release the Zen based desktop FX CPUs by the last quarter of 2016. This would give the manufacturer some leverage for the debut of the holiday season, when many gamers upgrade or change their rigs.
Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) that benefit from Zen power are scheduled for 2017, but no official information about the release date exists. An APU is a 64-bit microprocessor crafted by AMD, which bundles the GPU and CPU in the same hardware.
GPUOpen developers might have a big word to say in making the future releases of AMD competitive and attractive to customers. When that happens, we will be the first to update you.
