AMD announces GPUOpen, their open source answer to Nvidia GameWorks

Precusor

 AMD is today announcing GPUOpen, a comparable set of tools to GameWorks. As the name would suggest, however, there's a key difference between GPUOpen and GameWorks: GPUOpen will, when it is published in January, be open source. AMD will use the permissive MIT license, allowing GPUOpen code to be used without any practical restriction in both open and closed source applications, and will publish all code on GitHub.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/amd-embraces-open-source-to-take-on-nvidias-gameworks/

Wow..

Precusor

This is going to be a massive game changer for the GPU landscape.

Precusor

KayAndroid

AMD has been doing some pretty great stuff lately, I'm impressed!
The only thing is, I don't see this trickling down to MMOs  

Cleffy

The advantage of GameWorks isn't that its well supported. The advantage of GameWorks is that you get paid to use it.

It won't really be a game changer since NVidia will bribe all the people who make engines, much like PhysX. Probably the only ones affected will be Square Enix, and several medium sized developers who create their own engines. Most smaller developers license an engine and just don't use the technologies like PhysX.

Still even if there was wide scale adoption, it won't really affect how the GPUs perform. Most of the time when AMD helps a company develop around their GPU it runs just as good or better on NVidia GPUs. Like DIRT.

Ridelynn

Cleffy said:

The advantage of GameWorks isn't that its well supported. The advantage of GameWorks is that you get paid to use it.

This is the truth right here.

And the part about engine licenses - yeah, unless the big engines (Unity, Unreal, etc) include the support baked in, it won't see wide-spread use.

Mikeha

I just hope Zen turns out well. 

Athisar

Many of the games that have had the most problems on PCs have used GameWorks (Batman Arkham Knight, Assassin's Creed, etc). And those games are deliberately crippled for AMD and Intel platforms. An alternative, open source, version is going to benefit everyone, assuming it's picked up -- obviously GameWorks is only used when doing cross promotion deals with nvidia.

It also makes sense to have this alongside Vulkan, which will be an open standard, and certainly is going to get used with heavy backing from Valve, nvidia, AMD, Intel, Google, and others.