AMD released both their GPUOpen development package and a shiny new website to support it this week, and it has the computer hardware world questioning a number of things in the ongoing war for complete GPU dominance between AMD and Nvidia.

What is GPUOpen?

GPUOpen is AMD's answer to NVIDIA GameWorks and functions with a similar goal, they only differ in their core approach on the matter. Both are meant to give developers access to a number of tools and elements of the GPU to allow for faster, easier game development and more streamlined graphical optimization for their respective hardware. The difference is that NVIDIA wants to have a relatively high amount of control regarding the who, what, where, when, and why of developer access to these tools and to the inner framework of their GPUs, whereas AMD has gone full open source on the subject, going so far as to build in functionality so that code and various tools can be developed and shared among developers.

As AMD describes, “The GPUOpen initiative provides access to a comprehensive collection of visual effects, productivity tools, and other content at no cost. Easily shareable and downloadable, GPUOpen enables developers to level-up code and unlock the full potential of software development.”

It sounds like a fantastic idea, and the open source element appeals to a larger goal, a community of developers that all share and develop visual effects on a massive scale to create a global initiative to move computer graphics forward.

GPUOpen will hopefully represent a specific solution to an ongoing problem. NVIDIA GameWorks has been famously blamed for engineering performance that cripples AMD cards on a multitude of triple A titles. It's not clear whether this is a result of AMD's lack of a similar toolset like GPUOpen, malice on NVIDIA's part, or the inherent cost of optimizing a game specifically for a single type of GPU. Either way, the result has been significantly reduced performance on AMD cards when a game is developed using NVIDIA GameWorks. With AMD now offering GPUOpen, 2016 will hopefully be the year we say goodbye to some of the poorly optimized releases we saw in 2015.

Working for a brighter tomorrow

AMD has made some extremely heartwarming promises about GPUOpen, proposing a collective kumbaya of game developers and hardware manufacturers working together for a brighter future. A future where porting a game from console to PC is easy, and developers can have full access to the hardware they're optimizing for (unlike those other guys that want to keep some things locked down in a proprietary black box). A future where every developer large and small can collaborate and share what they've made with other like-minded individuals.

AMD outlined their goals on their new site:

“The first is to provide code and documentation allowing PC developers to exert more control on the GPU. Current and upcoming GCN architectures (such as Polaris) include many features not exposed today in PC graphics APIs, and GPUOpen aims to empower developers with ways to leverage some of those features. In addition to generating quality or performance advantages such access will also enable easier porting from current-generation consoles (XBox One™ and PlayStation 4) to the PC platform.

The second is a commitment to open source software. The game and graphics development community is an active hub of enthusiastic individuals who believe in the value of sharing knowledge. Full and flexible access to the source of tools, libraries and effects is a key pillar of the GPUOpen philosophy. Only through open source access are developers able to modify, optimize, fix, port and learn from software. The goal? Encouraging innovation and the development of amazing graphics techniques and optimizations in PC games.

The third is a collaborative engagement with the developer community. GPUOpen software is hosted on public source code repositories such as GitHub as a way to enable sharing and collaboration. Engineers from different functions will also regularly write blog posts about various GPU-related topics, game technologies or industry news.”

So far the jury is still out on how this will affect performance on a real world basis, but between Polaris and GPUOpen AMD seems dedicated to pushing their GPUs to the next level. If they keep up the momentum and manage to garner enough community support, this could be the answer to the undeniably disappointing driver support of AMD cards compared to their competition over at NVIDIA.

Article header image via Andreas Levers on Flickr.