AMD's GPUOpen site is up

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Bacon1

Diamond Member
Feb 14, 2016
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http://motherboard.vice.com/read/glimpse-of-the-purehair-hair-rendering-engine-at-gdc

I note that "Pure Hair" in Tomb Raider 2 is modified TressFX (i.e. they took TressFX as a base and then made their own better version). I strongly suspect none of those changes will go back to any open source libraries but will be kept as Square Enix's intellectual property - it now belongs to them. AMD doesn't even get mentioned in relation to it in general TR2 advertising, and no other dev will benefit from that work. All we read about is the other nvidia additions which because they are directly using nvidia libraries they have to credit nvidia. In addition Tomb Raider 2 including that Pure Hair now runs better on Nvidia hardware (it probably won't eventually but Nvidia released a driver for it in time for all the reviews and AMD didn't so all the review benchmarks now show Nvidia looking stronger).

This is the reality of what AMD's open source becomes. Sure it's a nice building block for someone, but it's not going to get updated by dev's as they will keep the changes and it's not going to help AMD.

FYI TressFx 3.1 included fixes that they got from Square Enix.
 

littleg

Senior member
Jul 9, 2015
355
38
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Here is another thing that AMD is opening up...
https://radeon-prorender.github.io/

It really is too bad that nvidia is all talk, they did say they were going to open things up, but, since they made that announcement, we see how "open" they are, which is to say, not much has changed with them.

They need to get rid of either 'helps' or the s from the end of 'reduces' in the third paragraph. Maybe i'm a little OCD about this stuff.
 
Mar 11, 2004
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I shudder to think where we would be today on the PC if OpenGL was the standard instead of DX.

I doubt we'd be in much different of a place. Both need regular kick in the pants to propel things forward, and thanks to AMD both are at the same time so that there can be some real competition to hopefully push things forward.

We see what potential there is in the Vulkan Doom, and hopefully Bethesda pushes iDTech to more of their games and maybe even opens it up to licensing (although just pushing it across their own games, and thus getting people used to working with it via mods for Doom, Quake, ElderScrolls, and Fallout would be pretty significant).
 

SolMiester

Diamond Member
Dec 19, 2004
5,331
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Pushing all this to open source is the way to go IMO.
Proprietary crap hurts gamers, doesn't help them.

I disagree, only reason AMD does open source is cause they are pants at implementing their own code.
This way, they can promise the world as per normal and let OS do the work for them...
 

Hitman928

Diamond Member
Apr 15, 2012
5,181
7,631
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They need to get rid of either 'helps' or the s from the end of 'reduces' in the third paragraph. Maybe i'm a little OCD about this stuff.

No, they should fix that. Really that whole paragraph is a bit of a disaster. Looks like an intern wrote it trying to finish right before lunch or something. I don't know if this sort of thing should surprise me anymore, but properly edited publications seem to be a thing of the past. Not just talking about AMD here, it's a wide spread problem now for corporations and even many respected news publications (online articles at least).
 

littleg

Senior member
Jul 9, 2015
355
38
91
Seems to me the sentence was initially 'rendering capabilities and hardware efficiency drastically reduces the time' and the 'helps' was inserted after proofing so as it wasn't claiming sole responsibility for the speed up.
 
Mar 11, 2004
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I disagree, only reason AMD does open source is cause they are pants at implementing their own code.
This way, they can promise the world as per normal and let OS do the work for them...

Well I disagree. Considering devs were asking for this, I'll give AMD credit for listening and actually following through on this. Either way software on your hardware is at the mercy of the devs ability to take advantage of it, might as well offer what they want and try and help them make the best use of your hardware.

It actually doesn't even matter what the reason is, the result is that it is better for developers and consumers.
 

Elixer

Lifer
May 7, 2002
10,376
762
126
AMD has been releasing stuff for quite awhile now, the newest edition:
http://gpuopen.com/gaming-product/anvil-vulkan-framework/

Anvil is a cross-platform, open-source, MIT-licensed wrapper library for Vulkan™, developed by AMD engineers. It has been designed with the goal of reducing the amount of time that developers need to spend in order to write a working Vulkan application from scratch. As such, not only does the library provide the usual C++ wrappers one would expect, but also includes extra features, as described below:
 
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Yakk

Golden Member
May 28, 2016
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TressFX
Effects

The TressFX library implements AMD’s TressFX hair/fur rendering and simulation technology. The TressFX technology uses the GPU to simulate and render high-quality, realistic hair and fur. TressFX makes use of the processing power of high-performance GPUs to do realistic rendering and utilizes DirectCompute to physically simulate each individual strand of hair.

Highlights
  • GCN-optimized rendering and simulation
  • Hair and fur support, with high quality anti-aliasing
  • Animation/skinning support
  • Two options for order-independent transparency
  • Maya plugin provided for authoring
  • Full source code provided
New in TressFX 4
  • Hair is skinned directly, rather than through triangle stream-out.
  • Signed distance field (SDF) collision, including compute shaders to generate the SDF from a dynamic mesh.
  • New system for handling fast motion.
  • Refactored to be more engine / API agnostic.
  • Example code includes compute-based skinning and marching cubes generation.
  • DirectX 12 support, with an example for async compute

The TressFX process using Async Compute could be quite handy. Having low performance impact, or even impact free TressFX effects will be nice! Safe bet to say console developers will be looking at their version of this.
 

Elixer

Lifer
May 7, 2002
10,376
762
126
Kudos to AMD for making this happen.

radeon_software_adrenalin_edition_press_deck_%5Bnda_only_-_dec_12_2017%5D_final_21_575px.png


That is a pretty big milestone!