AMD Leverages Open Source to Square Off with Nvidia

AMD is announcing its new GPUOpen initiative. The company is moving in the direction of open source with both its computing and gaming efforts, and will likely compete very directly with Nvidia on this front. GPUOpen includes visual effects, driver utilities, troubleshooting tools, libraries and SDKs, all to be available as open source for developers to contribute to.

AMD will make available GPUOpen resources through a dedicated portal with links to open source content hosted on GitHub. The company also plans to offer blog posts on its resources and the graphics development community. 

As Tom's Hardware notes:

"When AMD launches GPUOpen this coming January, it plans to provide access to TressFX 3.0, GeometryFX, AOFX, ShadowFX, a handful of tools, the LiquidVR SDK, DirectX 11 and 12 code samples, compute tools, and several other SDKs. The company is emphatic about its dedication to open source, too. All of the software available through GPUOpen is provided without restriction, per the MIT License."

"As part of GPUOpen, AMD is discussing changes to the way it approaches Linux support, from the embedded and client markets up to HPC applications. The foundation of its strategy is AMDGPU, a base kernel driver that supports all of AMD’s 2015 GPUs/APUs."

Ars Technica adds:

"[GPUOpen will include] include a set of SDKs such as AMD's FireRender rendering engine, its GPU-accelerated ray tracing SDK, and its RapidFire cloud SDK. It'll also include AMD's CodeXL debuggers and performance profiler. Together, AMD is offering a substantial library of graphical resources, all open source and, in principle, GPU vendor-neutral."