Vulkan Memory Allocator 2.2
Introduction Vulkan Memory Allocator (VMA) is our single-header STB-like library for easily and efficiently managing memory allocation for your Vulkan games and applications. The last …
Introduction Vulkan Memory Allocator (VMA) is our single-header STB-like library for easily and efficiently managing memory allocation for your Vulkan games and applications. The last …
Foreword This is a guest post from Sebastian Aaltonen, co-founder of Second Order and previously senior rendering lead at Ubisoft®. Second Order published their first …
OCAT is our open source capture and analytics tool, designed to help game developers and performance analysts dig into the details of how the GPU …
Radeon GPU Profiler 1.4 While the G in GPU stands for graphics, there are also popular SIMD programming models and associated APIs that map well …
The AMD GPU Services (AGS) library provides game and application developers with the ability to query information about installed AMD GPUs and their driver, in …
We are excited to announce the release of Compressonator v3.1! This version contains several new features and optimizations, including new installers for the SDK, CLI and …
Organised by the fine folks at Wargaming, the 4C conference was held in Prague over 2 days in early October this year, bringing attendees and …
Radeon GPU Profiler 1.3.1 RGP 1.3.1 is a hotfix release to keep compatibility with an upcoming Radeon Adrenalin Edition graphics driver. That driver descends from …
OCAT, our open source capture and analytics tool, has come a really long way since the 1.1 release around this time last year. The focus …
Introduction We released Vulkan Memory Allocator 1.0 (VMA) back in July last year, but we’ve been remiss in posting about the progress of the library …
Radeon GPU Profiler 1.3 First, happy birthday to RGP! We released 1.0 publicly almost exactly a year ago at the time of writing, something I’ve …
There are traditionally just two hard problems in computer science — naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-1 errors — but I’ve long thought that there …
Adam Sawicki, a member of AMD RTG’s Game Engineering team, has spent the best part of a year assisting one of the world’s biggest game …
If you’ve ever heard the term “context roll” in the context of AMD GPUs — I’ll do that a lot in this post, sorry in …
Microsoft PIX is the premiere integrated performance tuning and debugging tool for Windows game developers using DirectX 12. PIX enables developers to debug and analyze …
With GDC 2018 done and dusted, we thought it’d be valuable to reemphasise that all of the presented content from the Advanced Graphics Techniques Tutorial …
The AMD GPU Services (AGS) library provides game and application developers with the ability to query information about installed AMD GPUs and their driver, in …
Radeon GPU Profiler 1.2 At GDC 2018 we talked about a new version of RGP that would interoperate with RenderDoc, allowing the two tools to …
Compressonator is a set of tools that allows artists and developers to work easily with compressed assets and easily visualize the quality impact of various …
We have posted the version 1.2 update to the TrueAudio Next open-source library to Github. It is available here. This update has a number of …
Vulkan™ is designed to have significantly smaller CPU overhead compared to other APIs like OpenGL®. This is achieved by various means – the API is …
Introduction Half-precision (FP16) computation is a performance-enhancing GPU technology long exploited in console and mobile devices not previously used or widely available in mainstream PC …
Real Time Ray Tracing was one of the hottest topics last week at GDC 2018. In this presentation, AMD Software Development Engineer and architect of Radeon …
The level of visual detail required of CAD models for the automotive industry or the most advanced film VFX requires a level of visual accuracy …
If you’re into the state of the art in games, especially real-time gaming graphics, your eyes will undoubtedly be on Moscone Center in San Francisco, …
The long wait is over. The GPU processing power of TrueAudio Next (TAN) has now been integrated into Steam Audio from Valve (Beta 13 release). …
Radeon GPU Profiler 1.1.1 With GDC 2018 getting ever closer, we wanted to get one last minor release of RGP out before things get hectic …
Radeon GPU Profiler 1.1.0 It feels like just last week that we released Radeon GPU Profiler (RGP) 1.0.3 but my calendar says almost 2 months …
Insights from Enscape as to how they designed a renderer that produces path traced real time global illumination and can also converge to offline rendered image quality
We are excited to announce the release of Compressonator V2.7! This version contains several new features and optimizations, including: Cross Platform Support Due to popular demand, …
Radeon GPU Profiler 1.0.3 A couple of months on from the release of 1.0.2, we’ve fully baked and sliced 1.0.3 for your low-level DX12- and …
The AMD GPU Services (AGS) library provides game and application developers with the ability to query information about installed AMD GPUs and their driver, in …
Due to architectural differences between Zen and our previous processor architecture, Bulldozer, developers need to take care when using the Windows® APIs for processor and core enumeration. …
The AMD GCN Vulkan extensions allow developers to get access to some additional functionalities offered by the GCN architecture which are not currently exposed in the Vulkan API. One of these is the ability to access the barycentric coordinates at the fragment-shader level.
Thanks (again!) Before we dive into a run over the release notes for the 1.0.2 release of Radeon GPU Profiler, we’d like to thank everyone …
Understanding the instruction-level capabilities of any processor is a worthwhile endeavour for any developer writing code for it, even if the instructions that get executed …
An important part of learning the Vulkan API – just like any other API – is to understand what types of objects are defined in it, what they represent and how they relate to each other. To help with this, we’ve created a diagram that shows all of the Vulkan objects and some of their relationships, especially the order in which you create one from another.
Summary In this blog post we are announcing the open-source availability of the Radeon™ ProRender renderer, an implementation of the Radeon ProRender API. We will give …
Introduction and thanks Effective GPU performance analysis is a more complex proposition for developers today than it ever has been, especially given developments in how …
TressFX 4 introduces a number of improvements. This blog post focuses on three of these, all of which are tied to simulation: Bone-based skinning Signed distance …
Full application control over GPU memory is one of the major differentiating features of the newer explicit graphics APIs such as Vulkan® and Direct3D® 12. …
We are excited to announce the release of Compressonator V2.6. This version contains several new features and optimizations, including: Adaptive Format Conversion for general transcoding operations …
When getting a new piece of hardware, the first step is to install the driver. You can see how to install them for the Radeon …
In this blog we will go through the installation process of the driver for your new Radeon Vega Frontier card. We will go through the …
When using a compute shader, it is important to consider the impact of thread group size on performance. Limited register space, memory latency and SIMD occupancy each affect shader performance in different ways. This article discusses potential performance issues, and techniques and optimizations that can dramatically increase performance if correctly applied.
The AMD Developer Tools team is thrilled to announce the availability of the AMD plugin for Microsoft’s PIX for Windows tool. PIX is a performance …
A new version of the CodeXL open-source developer tool is out! Here are the major new features in this release: CPU Profiling Support for AMD …
When it comes to multi-GPU (mGPU), most developers immediately think of complicated Crossfire setups with two or more GPUs and how to make their game …
Introduction Shortly after our Capsaicin and Cream event at GDC this year where we unveiled Radeon RX Vega, we hosted a developer-focused event designed to …
BC6 HDR Compression The BC6H codec has been improved and now offers better quality then previous releases, along with support for both 16 bit Half …
This article explains how to use Radeon GPU Analyzer (RGA) to produce a live VGPR analysis report for your shaders and kernels. Basic RGA usage …
I’m Mike Schmit, Director of Software Engineering with the Radeon Technologies Group at AMD. I’m leading the development of a new open-source 360-degree video-stitching framework …
AMD LiquidVR MultiView Rendering in Serious Sam VR with the GPU Services (AGS) Library AMD’s MultiView Rendering feature reduces the number of duplicated object draw …
In 2016, AMD brought TrueAudio Next to GameSoundCon. GameSoundCon was held Sept 27-28 at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. GameSoundCon caters to game …
Budgeting, measuring and debugging video memory usage is essential for the successful release of game titles on Windows. As a developer, this can be efficiently achieved with the …
Another year, another Game Developer Conference! GDC is held earlier this year (27 February – 3 March 2017) which is leaving even less time for …
With the launch of AGS 5.0 developers now have access to the shader compiler control API. Here’s a quick summary of the how and why…. Background …
There are many games out there taking place in vast environments. The basic building block of every environment is height-field based terrain – there’s no …
Understanding concurrency (and what breaks it) is extremely important when optimizing for modern GPUs. Modern APIs like DirectX® 12 or Vulkan™ provide the ability to …
Summary Many Gaming and workstation laptops are available with both (1) integrated power saving and (2) discrete high performance graphics devices. Unfortunately, 3D intensive application …
This post is taking a look at some of the interesting bits of helping id Software with their DOOM® Vulkan™ effort, from the perspective of …
This blog is guest authored by Croteam developer Karlo Jez and he will be giving us a detailed look at how Affinity Multi-GPU support was …
When opening a 64-bit crash dump you will find that you will not necessarily get a sensible call stack. This is because 64-bit crash dumps …
Vulkan™’s barrier system is unique as it not only requires you to provide what resources are transitioning, but also specify a source and destination pipeline …
This is the third post in the follow up series to my prior GDC talk on Variable Dynamic Range. Prior posts covered dithering, today’s topic …
Virtual desktop infrastructure systems and cloud gaming are increasingly gaining popularity thanks to an ever more improved internet infrastructure. This gives more flexibility to the …
As noted in my previous blog, new innovations in virtual reality have spearheaded a renewed interest in audio processing, and many new as well as …
This week marks the last in the series of our regular Warhammer Wednesday blog posts. We’d like to extent our thanks to Creative Assembly’s Lead …
Audio Must be Consistent With What You See Virtual reality demands a new way of thinking about audio processing. In the many years of history …
Happy Warhammer Wednesday! This week Creative Assembly’s Lead Graphics Programmer Tamas Rabel talks about how Total War: Warhammer utilized asynchronous compute to extract some extra …
It’s Wednesday, so we’re continuing with our series on Total War: Warhammer. Here’s Tamas Rabel again with some juicy details about how Creative Assembly brought …
A new release of the CodeXL open-source developer tool is out! Here’s the hot new stuff in this release: New platforms support Support Linux systems …
We’re back again on this fine Warhammer Wednesday with more from Tamas Rabel, Lead Graphics Programmer on the Total War series. In last week’s post …
For the next few weeks we’ll be having a regular feature on GPUOpen that we’ve affectionately dubbed “Warhammer Wednesdays”. We’re extremely lucky to have Tamas Rabel, …
Game engines do most of their shading work per-pixel or per-fragment. But there is another alternative that has been popular in film for decades: object …
EDIT: 2016/08/08 – Added section on Targeting Low-Memory GPUs This post serves as a guide on how to best use the various Memory Heaps and …
Before Direct3D® 12 and Vulkan™, resources were bound to shaders through a “slot” system. Some of you might remember when hardware did have only very …
Multi-GPU systems are much more common than you might think. Most of the time, when someone mentions mGPU, you think about high-end gaming machines with …
Compressonator is a set of tools to allow artists and developers to more easily create compressed texture image assets and easily visualize the quality impact …
Prior to explicit graphics APIs a lot of draw-time validation was performed to ensure that resources were synchronized and everything set up correctly. A side-effect of this robustness …
Direct3D® 12 and Vulkan™ significantly reduce CPU overhead and provide new tools to better use the GPU. For instance, one common use case for the …
As promised, we’re back and today I’m going to cover how to get resources to and from the GPU. In the last post, we learned …
A new CodeXL release is out! For the first time the AMD Developer Tools group worked on this release on the CodeXL GitHub public repository, …
Today, we are excited to announce that we are releasing an update for ShadowFX that adds support for DirectX® 12. Features Different shadowing modes Union of …
Achieving high performance from your Graphics or GPU Compute applications can sometimes be a difficult task. There are many things that a shader or kernel …
The GCN architecture contains a lot of functionality in the shader cores which is not currently exposed in current APIs like Vulkan™ or Direct3D® 12. One …
A Complete Tool to Transform Your Desktop Appearance After introducing our Display Output Post Processing (DOPP) technology, we are introducing a new tool to change …
Compaction is a basic building block of many algorithms – for instance, filtering out invisible triangles as seen in Optimizing the Graphics Pipeline with Compute. …
We are releasing TressFX 3.1. Our biggest update in this release is a new order-independent transparency (OIT) option we call “ShortCut”. We’ve also addressed some of …
Today’s update for GeometryFX introduces cluster culling. Previously, GeometryFX worked on a per-triangle level only. With cluster culling, GeometryFX is able to reject large chunks …
Full-speed, out-of-order rasterization If you’re familiar with graphics APIs, you’re certainly aware of the API ordering guarantees. At their core, these guarantees mean that if …
A New Milestone After the success of the first version, FireRays is moving to another major milestone. We are open sourcing the entire library which …
Last week, we organized a two hours-long talk at University of Lodz in Poland where we discussed the most common mistakes we come across in Vulkan applications. Dominik Witczak, …
We are very pleased to be announcing that AMD is open-sourcing one of our most popular tools and SDKs. Compressonator (previously released as AMD Compress …
Gaming at optimal performance and quality at high screen resolutions can sometimes be a demanding task for a single GPU. 4K monitors are becoming mainstream and gamers …
If you have supported Crossfire™ or Eyefinity™ in your previous titles, then you have probably already used our AMD GPU Services (AGS) library. A lot of …
Resource creation and management has changed dramatically in Direct3D® and Vulkan™ compared to previous APIs. In older APIs, memory is managed transparently by the driver. …
CodeXL major release 2.0 is out! It is chock-full of new features and a drastic change in the CodeXL development model: CodeXL is now open …
The prior post in this series established a base technique for adding grain, and now this post is going to look at very subtle changes to …
Welcome back to our performance & optimization series. Today, we’ll be looking more closely at shaders. On the surface, it may look as if they …
This is the first of a series of posts expanding on the ideas presented at GDC in the Advanced Techniques and Optimization of VDR Color …
The Game Developer Conference 2016 was an event of epic proportions. Presentations, tutorials, round-tables, and the show floor are only one part of the story …
This post describes how GCN hardware coalesces memory operations to minimize traffic throughout the memory hierarchy. The post uses the term “invocation” to describe one …
Bandwidth is always a scarce resource on a GPU. On one hand, hardware has made dramatic improvements with the introduction of ever faster memory standards …
Vulkan™ provides unprecedented control to developers over generating graphics and compute workloads for a wide range of hardware, from tiny embedded processors to high-end workstation GPUs with wildly different …
The Game Developer Conference 2016 (GDC16) is held March 14-18 in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is the most important event for game developers, …
Welcome back to our DX12 series! Let’s dive into one of the hottest topics right away: synchronization, that is, barriers and fences! Barriers A barrier is …
Vulkan™ is a high performance, low overhead graphics API designed to allow advanced applications to drive modern GPUs to their fullest capacity. Where traditional APIs …
Imagine that you were asked one day to design an API with bleeding-edge graphics hardware in mind. It would need to be as efficient as …
Hello and welcome to our series of blog posts covering performance advice for Direct3D® 12 & Vulkan™. You may have seen the #DX12PerfTweets on Twitter, and …
For GPU-side dynamically generated data structures which need 3D spherical mappings, two of the most useful mappings are cubemaps and octahedral maps. This post explores …
I have met enough game developers in my professional life to know that these guys are among the smartest people on the planet. Those particular individuals will go …
About CodeXL Analyzer CLI CodeXL Analyzer CLI is an offline compiler and performance analysis tool for OpenCL™ kernels, DirectX® shaders and OpenGL® shaders. Using CodeXL …
GPU PerfStudio supports DirectX® 12 on Windows® 10 PCs. The current tool set for DirectX 12 comprises of an API Trace, a new GPU Trace …
Today we’re going to take a look at how asynchronous compute can help you to get the maximum out of a GPU. I’ll be explaining …
What’s New With the recent adoption of new APIs such as DirectX® 12 and Vulkan™, we are seeing renewed interest in an older tool. AMD …
A typical problem with MSAA Resolve mixed with HDR is that a single sample with a large HDR value can over-power all other samples, resulting …
The Game Developer Conference 2016 (GDC16) is held March 14-18 in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is the most important event for game developers, and even though it gets incredibly busy, it’s the one I look forward to the most every year. Like previous years, myself and many of my colleagues will be attending. AMD and our partners will be covering different topics in GDC presentations, and here is some information on the sessions you can look forward to.
Like every year, AMD and NVIDIA are presenting a joint all-day tutorial session on Monday, 14 March. This tutorial will be focusing quite a bit on DirectX® 12 so game developers interested in learning more about explicit APIs and DirectX 12 in particular should definitely attend this tutorial. This collaboration is a rare opportunity to hear advice recommended by both GPU hardware vendors. The tutorial will have the following sessions:
This session is presented by both AMD and NVIDIA speakers. It provides an overview of the API programming model, and includes programming recommendations to get the best out of it. AMD and NVIDIA don’t always agree on everything and the preparations for this particular session can sometimes be “interesting” but I’m pleased to say we usually do a good job on showing a united front on most recommendations. Any AMD or NVIDIA-specific recommendation will be labelled as such.
The Hitman is striking again – just in time for GDC. 16 years after his first appearance, he’s still on the cutting edge of technology – this year, using Direct3D 12. Jonas from IO Interactive will cover the advances made for the latest installment of Hitman and explain how IO beefed up the engine to take advantage of explicit APIs.
Quantum Break is a game with an enormous vision. Remedy graphics programmer Ville Timonen will describe how the Northlight engine fulfills this vision, and how Remedy was able to improve rendering efficiency of the engine via optimal use of the DirectX API.
This session is presented by NVIDIA and proposes a new technique for fast culling of tiles. It will also offer useful advice on how to deal with multiple GPUs.
Graphics programmer guru Dan Baker will describe object space rendering, a REYES-style technique used in the Nitrous engine that powers the PC title Ashes of the Singularity. DirectX 12 has the ability to render a lot more draw calls than previous PC graphics APIs; we will see how this capability (among others) is leveraged to implement this rendering method with great efficiency. This session is probably one of the sessions I’m looking forward to the most due to its potential for a new shift in future real-time graphics rendering techniques.
FXAA author Timothy Lottes is serious about image quality (just trust me on this!). With HDR/EDR displays about to become mainstream it is important that game developers understand what this means for their engine’s color pipeline. Timothy will present a number of techniques and optimizations that will prove useful to developers aiming to add HDR display support to their games.
Session | Speakers | Room | Day/Time | Link |
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Practical DirectX 12 – Programming Model and Hardware Capabilities | Gareth Thomas (AMD), Alex Dunn (NVIDIA) | #135 North Hall |
Monday 10.00-11.00 |
Register |
Rendering ‘Hitman’ with DirectX 12 | Jonas Meyer (IO) | #135 North Hall |
Monday 11.20-11.50 |
Register |
Developing the Northlight Engine: Lessons Learned | Ville Timonen (Remedy Games) | #135 North Hall |
Monday 11.50-12.20 |
Register |
Culling at the Speed of Light in Tiled Shading and How to Manage Explicit Multi-GPU | Dmitry Zdhan (NVIDIA), Juha Sjoholm (NVIDIA) | #135 North Hall |
Monday 13.20-14.20 |
Register |
Object Space Rendering in DirectX 12 | Dan Baker (Oxide) | #135 North Hall |
Monday 14.40-15.40 |
Register |
Advanced Techniques and Optimization of HDR Color Pipelines | Timothy Lottes (AMD) | #135 North Hall |
Monday 16.00-17.00 |
Register |
One of this year’s highlights will be a session on the lessons learned from the first wave of Vulkan™– and DirectX 12–based games. Hosted by AMD’s Matthaeus Chajdas, this presentation will show you how these new low-level APIs have served in recent titles and what game developers can take away from those experiences. If you’re a developer working on DirectX 12 or Vulkan code you will want to attend this.
Developer Technology Engineer Stephan Hodes and Driver Architect Dave Oldcorn unite to present a very informative session on how to optimally manage DIRECT, COMPUTE and COPY queues in DirectX 12 for maximum efficiency. Ideal scenarios for leveraging concurrent execution on those queues will be covered. Dan Baker of Oxide fame will make a guest appearance to explain how the Nitrous engine is able to achieve up to 30% extra performance via the use of asynchronous compute in the DirectX 12 API.
As explicit APIs Direct3D 12 and Vulkan can be difficult to develop for, especially with few graphics tools currently supporting them. This session will detail the support for those new APIs that AMD added to the CodeXL suite of developer tools.
AMD will hold a dedicated session on the brand new API from Khronos: Vulkan. This presentation will enable game developers to go straight to the most efficient ways to drive the API, in particular from a GCN-based hardware perspective.
Microsoft principal development lead Max McMullen has been the public face of the DirectX 12 API for quite some time now. Max’s session should prove very valuable for any developer wishing to get up to speed with this new API.
Our friends at Valve, Unity and Croteam will also present on Vulkan in their session.
Session | Speakers | Room | Day/Time | Link |
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D3D12 & Vulkan: Lessons Learned | Matthaeus Chajdas (AMD) | #3016 West Hall |
Thursday 10.00-11.00 |
Register |
Right on Queue: Advanced DirectX 12 programming | Stephan Hodes (AMD), Dave Oldcorn (AMD), Dan Baker (Oxide) | #2024 West Hall | Wednesday 9.30-10.30 |
Register |
Let your Game Shine – Optimizing DirectX 12 and Vulkan Performance with AMD CodeXL | Doron Ofek (AMD) | #2024 West Hall | Wednesday 11.00-12.00 |
Register |
Vulkan Fast Paths | Graham Sellers (AMD), Timothy Lottes (AMD), Matthaeus Chajdas (AMD) | #2024 West Hall | Wednesday 12.30-13.30 |
Register |
DirectX 12 Advancements | Max McMullen (Microsoft) | #2009 West Hall | Wednesday 12.30-13.30 |
Register |
Practical Development for Vulkan | Dan Ginsburg (Valve), Dean Sekulic (Croteam), Baldur Karlsson (Unity) | #3009 West Hall | Thursday 12.45-13.45 |
Register |
GDC 2016 will include a session on LiquidVR that will describe the current features of the SDK (currently available on the GPUOpen website) and its future. This session is part of the brand new VRDC (Virtual Reality Developer Conference) that’s held on Monday and Tuesday at GDC.
Fast OpenCL compute capabilities are essential for GPU-based ray-tracing solutions to be viable for interactive rendering and previsualization purposes. AMD will describe how Firerays and Firerender leverage the performance of the GPU to achieve these purposes.
This session will be covering the GPUOpen philosophy, its current contents and some of the new stuff we’re adding in future updates. The session will include guest speaker Jean-Normand Bucci from Eidos Montreal who will talk about how source code access to TressFX was key to implement the innovative features of PureHair, the hair rendering technology used in several Eidos titles.
Industry veterans Chris Donahue and Ritche Corpus will give a business-oriented talk that will prove interesting for game developers looking to get their games noticed.
Graham Wihlidal of Frostbite fame has a great presentation that will undoubtedly appeal to graphics engineers who want to maximize the performance of their graphics engine! He will be presenting the result of his research into using the compute pipeline to cull geometry prior to it being sent to the graphics pipeline. Do not miss it.
Session | Speakers | Room | Day/Time | Link |
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LiquidVR Today and Tomorrow | Guennadi Riguer (AMD) | #2011 West Hall | Tuesday 10.00-11.00 |
Register |
Multiplatform GPU Ray-Tracing Solutions With FireRender and FireRays | Takahiro Harada (AMD), Dmitry Kozlov (AMD) | #2024 West Hall | Wednesday 14.00-15.00 |
Register |
GPUOpen – Unlocking Game Development with Open Source | Nicolas Thibieroz (AMD), Jason Stewart (AMD), Jean-Normand Bucci (Eidos Montreal) + others | #2024 West Hall | Wednesday 3.30-4.30 |
Register |
Business Development 101 – A Primer on Working with the Platforms From the People who Built Them | Chris Donahue (AMD), Ritche Corpus (AMD) | #2024 West Hall | Wednesday 17.00-18.00 |
Register |
Optimizing the Graphics Pipeline With Compute | Graham Wihlidal (Frostbite) | #2002 West Hall | Friday 10.00-11.00 |
Register |
AMD sessions held on Wednesday in room #2024 will include a raffle for a chance to win a brand new AMD GPU!
To find out more about GDC, visit the conference website or check out AMD’s guide to conference sessions and other proceedings. A lot of interesting content this year so make sure to mark the date!