AMD counters Nvidia Gameworks with open source

The graphics card giant Nvidia has for years worked closely with game developers through the program The Way It’s Meant To Be Played, partly to improve the graphical effects and partly to provide special optimizations for Geforce. This has not always gone down well with enthusiasts as well as arch-rival AMD, which in recent years has come up with the corresponding concept Gaming Evolved.

In connection with the formation of the department Radeon Technologies Group, led by graphics legend Raja Koduri, AMD is taking new steps and intends to go up against Nvidia with open source code. The background is mainly Nvidia Gameworks, where middleware with proprietary code in “black boxes” makes it difficult for developers to optimize game titles for different systems’ hardware.

To meet Nvidia’s black boxes, AMD will embrace open source for large parts of its software and developer tools. The initiative called “GPUOpen” will give developers full access to effects such as hair extensions with TressFX, LiquidVR, Firerays, Firerender and Firerender SDK, as well as analysis tools.

AMD’s new open source resources will be available in January 2016 via Github. In addition, all open resources will go under an MIT license, which means that it will be free to modify and even resell the software.