As a continuation of the strategy we started with Mantle, AMD 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... AMD launches GPUOpen Initiative
Sounds great! but AMD try to do many things at once, they usually promise talk PR powerpoint, and fail... Well 2016 could be the red year, or part red part green, i'll go meditate with Yoda and post conclusion.
This is good news. Hopefully more devs will sign on to this and it will push Nvidia to open it's Gameworks library more. Nvidia has been awfully silent lately in general.
GPUOpen is essentially AMD's answer to GameWorks, with the massive advantage of being able optimize the libraries and effect pipelines for targeting all vendors. Basically; AMD's Open Source "GameWorks" This is great for the reason that a game that uses GPUOpen will quite likely look and and run great on Team Green, Team Red, AND Team Blue. (hehe)
Nvidia counting that cash bro. good for AMD, they doing a lot & that a good thing for us Gamers. Nvidia not so much, Brokeworks lol
Idk, the companies definitely push off eachother. You have to remember, ATi was the OEM with literally zero customer interaction. It wasn't until Nvidia came along and started making everything about the "Gamer" that ATi actually start communicating at all to end users. There wouldn't be a Freesync if G-Sync didn't come along. There wouldn't be a GPUOpen library if Gameworks didn't exist. And it goes vice versa.
Nvidia can let the market share speak for itself. You can't say a company would be doing anything wrong when it dominates 80% of the market. Perhaps if AMD can rise 10 points, Nvidia would already feel the need to do something flashy (aside from the basic GPU chip marketing, which is always flashy from both sides).
I believe since AMD has split so much now, they can focus more on the software level more than they ever have in the past. They may not have the fastest hardware, but if they have a great combination of hardware and software to meet performance demands and enough developer support, it could be great. I just fear that AMD will become the next 3dfx with Glide for example. Glide had great support but lost to Direct X. It does seem that Microsoft is working more with both AMD and Nvidia this time around though.
You can think of this what you want, but the tune's the same as with dx12, Mantle, and all those features that came, or will come along. As long as the devs have to put in the work, we won't see it happening broadly as a matter of a technological base every game will make use of.. Games could have been more optimized for years now, and they weren't. Do you really think it was just because Mantle wasn't around? You know what, even until today not all devs have adopted Mantle, and just the same will be happening with anything AMD has to offer beyond consoles games. And games could be better optimised for PCs still, look at many of the ports. That's why GTA5 seems to be so popular among the PC ports, because it seems it was well done. Other ports haven't fared that well, neither on the technical side, nor with the gamers and their opinions about the games. Again, I'm not saying it's not good they try to offer something, but the point is, devs won't do it as long as people pay 120$ for preorder games when they haven't even played the beta. Or when we take technical lacking games and hail them because of their flair, and style, and the setting behind it, and yet pay full price willingly. If we buy what they offer, there's simply no reason for them to improve. And that's why I'm not all enthusiastic about such things, I just don't see them magically take over.
Developers get too comfortable with what they have already, that's the problem. For years we have been stuck on DX9 and finally there's the move to DX11 now. I hope that the Xbox One Windows 10 update will help with the push to DX12, but I'm skeptical of that.
It makes complete sense in that it should push DX12, as X1 developers also can use DX12. But will they use it there? Being skeptical is needed
Exactly! Here is how I see it going... I am a developer from GAMEMAKER software. I'm making a title for Xbox one and PC called SHOOTR12. Now since I have development tools for both, I'm going to be lazy and develop for Xbox One since it's a console that sells. Game is done on Xbox One! Sweet! Let's port it to PC now! (This could go one of two ways, I assume Microsoft has given the easy porting tools from Xbox One to PC with full DX12 porting support, but who knows.) If I can do a straight port from Xbox One to PC with full DX12 support, okay let's do it! If I have to port my game with DX12 support added, well that's gonna be a little hard for me and I'm lazy. Port DX10/11 for cost and time reasons, and also because I'm lazy. Microsoft is doing a decent job pushing DX12 but they need to actually push it harder!
Pretty much sums it up. As long as they won't need any additional arguments or gimmicks to sell their games, they won't invest money into adding such things. More or less what I meant above.
I never liked the idea of hardware companies doing game devs job but at least this is open source and a few devs will adapt it to their games, better than adapting their games to the middleware cough, cough.
