AMD announces open source initiative GPUOpen

AMD is making some big waves in the world of open source with its GPUOpen initiative. The company is pulling out all the stops to make it easier for developers to create games and applications via greater access to the GPU and its resources.

Marco Chiappetta reports for Hot Hardware:

In a nutshell, AMD is releasing a slew of open-source software and tools to give developers of games, heterogeneous applications, and HPC applications deeper access to the GPU and GPU resources. Let’s discuss gaming first. AMD and the RTG are looking for ways to ease game development, so games for PCs and consoles can be produced in a similar manner. To quote AMD, “As a continuation of the strategy we started with Mantle, we are giving even more control of the GPU to developers. As console developers have benefited from low-level access to the GPU, AMD wants to continue to bring this level of access to the PC space.” The AMD GPUOpen initiative is meant to give developers the ability to more easily leverage assets they've already made for console development. With GPUOpen, game developers will have direct access to GPU hardware, as well as access to a large collection of open source effects, tools, libraries and SDKs, which are being made available on GitHub under an MIT open-source license, which essentially gives users unrestricted access to the software. AMD hopes that GPUOpen will enable console-style development for PC games through this open source software initiative. But the company doesn’t stop there. GPUOpen also includes an end-to-end open source compute infrastructure for cluster-based computing and a new Linux software and driver strategy More at Hot Hardware

AMD's open source efforts caught the attention of Linux redditors and they shared their thoughts: