AMD plans to offer developers low-level access to its GPUs next year through GPUOpen, a program almost similar to Nvidia’s GameWorks program.
"As a continuation of the strategy we started with Mantle, we are giving even more control of the GPU to developers," AMD said in a statement. The goal is to make developing for the PC as easy as developing for the console. "AMD GPUOpen for gaming is giving developers the ability to harness the investments they’ve made on console development, including feature-rich, close-to-the-metal programming, and bring that to life on PC game development. Game developers will now have direct access to GPU hardware, access to a large collection of open source effects, tools, libraries and SDKs."
AMD said GPUOpen would give PC game developers access that console-only developers have long enjoyed. The company hopes that an open-source approach will attract developers who want more freedom than Nvidia's closely controlled GameWorks middleware allows.
Seperately, AMD developed a new HPC-focused open source driver and system runtime. This new Linux driver brings key capabilities to address core high-performance computing needs, including low latency compute dispatch and PCIe data transfers; peer-to-peer GPU support; Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) from InfiniBand that interconnects directly to GPU memory; and Large Single Memory Allocation support.