AMD relaunches GPUOpen

[shankly1985]

Nicolas Thibieroz


A little over four years ago, I remarked that it was “time to open up the GPU”. In that time, GPUOpen has done just that, passing some amazing milestones.



We’ve launched fantastic new developer tools such as Radeon GPU Profiler – a ground-breaking graphics profiler that provides unprecedented in-depth access to GPU execution information that developers can harness to optimize their titles. In the same vein we are releasing this week Radeon Memory Visualizer, a tool that reveals the memory mapping of your game in truly novel ways for the PC platform.

We’ve seen the introduction -and today the expansion- of the FidelityFX family: a collection of highly-optimized, truly open-source effects that developers can easily integrate into their titles, or inspire themselves from when writing their own implementations.

The Radeon™ GPU Profiler

Truly open source shader-based effects
We published a variety of SDKs aimed at making developers’ lives easier by providing code samples or libraries educating them about new API features, or enabling convenient access to useful functionalities such as our widely-integrated Vulkan and D3D12 Memory Allocator libraries.

Our focus on providing documentation has not faltered, with ISA and programming guides for a variety of Radeon GPU architectures released over the last four years. Combined with over 50 tutorials, including guest posts from renowned game developers, these form the basis of the GPUOpen philosophy: opening up the GPU for developers to access the knowledge and functionality needed to foster innovation and constantly improve graphics performance.



All this and much, much more.



But the game industry – and the wider rendering community – has changed a lot in the last four years. Explicit APIs such as DirectX®12 and Vulkan® are now widely supported in games, and with them come a new set of exciting programming paradigms, language features and optimization opportunities. Change and innovation is what keeps the games industry – and the wider tech industry – so exciting. With so much change, it’s only right that we change too.



That is why today, I am delighted to announce that GPUOpen is reborn. We’re retaining the same core commitment to put you – the developer – at the heart of everything we do, but we’re doubling down on everything that made the original site so great. Fantastic tools, cutting-edge open-source effects and high-quality software components to allow you to get the most out of the hardware: GPU of course, but also CPU content to help you drive graphics rendering in the most efficient way possible. We’ve overhauled the site from top to tail. Streamlining it, to make it easier to find what you need to build legendary games.

A symbol of our commitment to openness
This week we’ll be celebrating the rebirth of GPUOpen by releasing new content, and a new official @GPUOpen Twitter handle that you may want to follow for regular updates and developer topics. We’ll conclude relaunch celebrations on Friday, with our online “Let’s build…” event where several AMD speakers will present a variety of topics relevant to graphics development and optimizations.

I’d like to thank all developers for the huge levels of support you have given us in the past four years. The GPUOpen team is delighted to be able to continue to serve the development community, and we’re all looking forward to welcoming you back to the site.

Nicolas Thibieroz
Nicolas Thibieroz is the Director of Worldwide Game Engineering at AMD. Over the years, he and his team have helped countless numbers of PC game developers tame the GPU to make faster and better-looking games. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.


https://gpuopen.com/lets-build-the-future/

https://twitter.com/GPUOpen

 

[shankly1985]

Create wonder. No black boxes
FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) provides a mixed ability to sharpen and optionally scale an image.
Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) provides a mixed ability to sharpen and optionally scale an image. The algorithm adjusts the amount of sharpening per pixel to target an even level of sharpness across the image. Areas of the input image that are already sharp are sharpened less, while areas that lack detail are sharpened more. This allows for higher overall natural visual sharpness with fewer artifacts.

CAS was designed to help increase the quality of existing Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) solutions. TAA often introduces a variable amount of blur due to temporal feedback. The adaptive sharpening provided by CAS is ideal to restore detail in images produced after TAA .

CAS’ optional scaling capability is designed to support Dynamic Resolution Scaling (DRS). DRS changes render resolution every frame, which requires scaling prior to compositing the fixed-resolution User Interface (UI). CAS supports both up-sampling and down-sampling in the same single pass that applies sharpening.

COMPARISON

High-fidelity reflections in your scene, without costing the earth. SSSR uses your rendered frame to create brilliant reflections.
The term “Screen Space Reflections” describes an effect that can create realistic looking reflections purely based on information already present in the rendered image. The underlying algorithm shoots reflection rays from a depth imprint of the rendered scene (a so called “depth buffer”) and follows them in constant steps through the image until these rays intersect with the depth buffer again. Instead of taking constant sized steps, FidelityFX SSSR builds on an industry-leading algorithm that searches the rendered image in a hierarchical manner. This allows for larger and fewer steps on average, increasing performance of the search and quality of the final image.

To support glossy reflections, this FidelityFX effect jitters the reflection rays to create the sense of surfaces with varying roughness. However, that approach inherently introduces noise. Thus, FidelityFX SSSR comes with a high quality denoiser specifically optimized for the RDNA architecture. The denoiser combines the results from multiple frames to create a noise-free image. Furthermore, it allows to decrease the ray count based on surface roughness thus further speeding up screen space traversal.

COMPARISON

FidelityFX LPM provides an open source library to easily integrate HDR and wide gamut tone and gamut mapping into your game.

COMPARISON

FidelityFX Single Pass Downsampler (SPD) provides an RDNA-optimized solution for generating up to 12 MIP levels of a texture.
MIP levels have versions of the same texture but in smaller resolutions. They are used when the high-resolution texture is not necessarily needed (such as when objects are far from the camera, covering only a few pixels) or might introduce aliasing artefacts. MIP levels are also commonly used in effects like Bloom, Screen Space Reflections, and many more.

Use FidelityFX SPD as a building block to accelerate your post processing pipeline or texture creation.

More key features:

• 
  
  
  • Generates up to 12 mip levels (maximum source texture size is 4096x4096).
  • Single function call.
  • User defined 2x2 reduction function.
  • User controlled border handling.
  • Supports various image formats.
  • HLSL and GLSL versions available.
  • Rapid Packed Math support.
  • Uses optionally subgroup operations / SM6+ wave operations, which can provide faster performance.

FidelityFX Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion (CACAO) is an RDNA-optimized implementation of ambient occlusion.

In 3D graphics, one of the biggest challenges is creating high quality lighting. Calculating physically accurate lighting is too computationally expensive to be done in real time, so instead multiple approximate models are used to create believable lighting.

One of these models is ambient lighting, which models indirect light in a scene. The most naïve ambient light model is to have ambient lighting constant across an entire scene. However, this can be greatly improved by ambient occlusion, in which there is less ambient light in areas with occluding geometry – for example in corners, where objects meet, nooks and crannies etc. This vastly improves believability of a scene and makes a scene easier to visually parse.

Computing ambient occlusion can be done in multiple ways. In static scenes ambient occlusion may be computed ahead of time. When this is done, the methods used are typically very expensive and take a long time to compute. However, in dynamic scenes in which content is not predictable ahead of time this is not an option. In this case the state of the art is to use screen space ambient occlusion, which computes the ambient occlusion each frame based on geometry rendered. When this approach is taken an implementation must be chosen which is a good balance of speed and quality.

The CACAO ambient occlusion implementation is a highly optimized implementation of ambient occlusion. It may be run at multiple different quality settings, allowing it to meet multiple different requirements for quality performance trade-offs, and be run across a wide range of hardware.

COMPARISON

 

[shankly1985]

Posted here, but I actually like your thread starter more so I'll remove my thread.
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/t...the-future-resigned-and-ready-to-go.18886699/

 

[shankly1985]

By the way guys you can download the effects samples and play around with them.

 

[shankly1985]

They should really concentrate on getting a good upscaler like Nvidia have now.

You mean DLSS? If so I think AMD will just use Microsoft version

 

[shankly1985]

More videos can be found here
https://gpuopen.com/lets-build/

 

[shankly1985]

Not a fan of SSR/SSSR personally - a few years ago sure but it is one foot in the past these days I'd rather see an effort made all around to move onto new ray tracing techniques than developers settle for an inferior but cheaper alternative.

Well options are always good. At the end of the day "it goes dark" if we can get cheaper options out there then more and more people can experience Ray Tracing and the people that want the more advanced stuff can upgrade to better GPUs.

In the next couple years you definitely will see the more mid range getting Ray tracing compatible but they will lack performance of the high end.