AMD takes shots at Nvidia with expanded FidelityFX toolkit and GPUOpen
AMD has announced the relaunch of GPUOpen, which now boasts a brand-new website and four new FideltyFX effects optimized for AMD Navi graphics cards.
GPUOpen, which AMD debuted in 2016, is a collection of open-source GPU technologies and specifications that developers can use in video game development.
The company today announced that it has overhauled the four-year-old website with a “modern look and feel”, giving developers a simple-to-use resource for accessing its GPUOpen tools and technologies, along with tutorials and samples and presentations.
In order to celebrate the launch of the long-overdue redesign, AMD announced that it’s also releasing new GPUOpen tools and technologies every day this week.
These RDNA-optimized effects will equip developers with more advanced tools for implementing high-quality post-process game effects, and will exist in contrast to Nvidia’s more exclusive GameWorks technologies like PhysX and HairWorks.
Eyecandy everywhere
The biggest part of the program is the expansion of the FideltyFX toolkit, which was introduced last year with Content Adaptive Sharpening (CAS). AMD has today added four new effects, including Stochastic Screen Space Reflections (SSSR), Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion, (CACAO), Luminance Preserving Mapper (LPM) and, Single Pass Downsampler (SPD).
As per Team Red’s announcement, SSSR will enable high-quality reflections with minimal overhead, CACAO will help improve the appearance of objects based on their exposure to ambient light, LPM will offer up superior HDR and wide color gamut content for games, and SPD generates texture MIP levels using asynchronous compute for optimal performance.
Additionally, AMD has released two new demos, which are available for download today. The first, FEMFEX, is Team Red’s open-source CPU library for deformable material physicals that “enables game developers to take physics realism to the next level”, while TressFX will allow for the creation of GPU-accelerated realistic hair, fur rendering and simulation technology in games.
To round out its GPUOpen relaunch week, as AMD calls it, the company will be hosting its first-ever virtual developer event on Friday. The “Let’s Build” event will play host to many of the presentations Team Red had planned for the now-postponed Game Developers Conference (GDC).
