GPUOpen
GPUOpen is a middleware software suite originally developed by AMD's Radeon Technologies Group that offers advanced visual effects for computer games. It was released in 2016. GPUOpen serves as an alternative to, and a direct competitor of Nvidia GameWorks. GPUOpen is similar to GameWorks in that it encompasses several different graphics technologies as its main components that were previously independent and separate from one another. However, GPUOpen is partially open source software, unlike GameWorks which is proprietary and closed. History GPUOpen was announced on December 15, 2015, and released on January 26, 2016. Rationale Nicolas Thibieroz, AMD's Senior Manager of Worldwide Gaming Engineering, argues that "it can be difficult for developers to leverage their R&D investment on both consoles and PC because of the disparity between the two platforms" and that "proprietary libraries or tools chains with "black box" APIs prevent developers from accessing the code for main ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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TressFX
AMD TressFX is a software library which provides for advanced simulation and rendering of hair, fur, and grass to be processed by the GPU. The initial library was written to perform well on AMD's GCN-based products. Version 3 was released on January 26, 2016, and works solely with Direct3D 11 and utilizes DirectCompute. A competing solution offered by Nvidia is HairWorks which is part of their Nvidia GameWorks suite and is proprietary in nature. Released as part of GPUOpen AMD TressFX is free and open-source software subject to the MIT License. Motivations for development and origins Traditionally, hair representation in video games has been sub-par for several reasons. For short hair (especially on male characters), hair has often been represented by a detailed texture on a character's skeleton. This makes it difficult to represent hair styles that are not pressed flat against the skull. Longer hair is often represented as a texture on a moving part of a skeleton and thus ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Vulkan (API)
Vulkan is a cross-platform API and open standard for 3D graphics and computing. It was intended to address the shortcomings of OpenGL, and allow developers more control over the GPU. It is designed to support a wide variety of GPUs, CPUs and operating systems, and it is also designed to work with modern multi-core CPUs. Microsoft supports Vulkan 1.2 (and more) on Windows 10 and 11, with a downloadable compatibility pack. Overview Vulkan targets high-performance real-time 3D-graphics applications, such as video games and interactive media, and highly parallelized computing. Vulkan is intended to offer higher performance and more efficient CPU and GPU usage compared to the older OpenGL and Direct3D 11 APIs. It does so by providing a considerably lower-level API for the application than the older APIs, that more closely resembles how modern GPUs work. Vulkan is comparable to Apple's Metal API and Microsoft's Direct3D 12. In addition to its lower CPU usage, Vulkan is des ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Nvidia GameWorks
Nvidia GameWorks is a middleware software suite developed by Nvidia. The Visual FX, PhysX, and Optix SDKs provide a wide range of enhancements pre-optimized for Nvidia GPUs. GameWorks is partially open-source. The competing solution being in development by AMD is GPUOpen, which was announced to be free and open-source software under the MIT License. Components Nvidia Gameworks consists of several main components: * VisualFX: For rendering effects such as smoke, fire, water, depth of field, soft shadows, HBAO+, TXAA, FaceWorks, and HairWorks. * PhysX: For physics, destruction, particle and fluid simulations. * OptiX: For baked lighting and general-purpose ray-tracing. * Core SDK: For facilitating development on Nvidia hardware. In addition, the suite contains sample code for DirectX and OpenGL developers, as well as tools for debugging, profiling, optimization, and Android development. See also * PhysX * GPUOpen * TressFX * Havok (software) Havok is a middleware software ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Advanced Micro Devices
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a Information technology, hardware and Fabless manufacturing, fabless company that designs and develops List of AMD processors, central processing units (CPUs), List of AMD graphics processing units, graphics processing units (GPUs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), System on a chip, system-on-chip (SoC), and high-performance computing, high-performance computer solutions. AMD serves a wide range of business and consumer markets, including gaming, data centers, artificial intelligence (AI), and embedded systems. AMD's main products include List of AMD microprocessors, microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, embedded processors, and List of AMD graphics processing units, graphics processors for Server (computing), servers, workstations, personal computers, and embedded syst ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Asynchronous Compute Engine
Graphics Core Next (GCN) is the codename for a series of microarchitectures and an instruction set architecture that were developed by AMD for its GPUs as the successor to its TeraScale microarchitecture. The first product featuring GCN was launched on January 9, 2012. GCN is a reduced instruction set SIMD microarchitecture contrasting the very long instruction word SIMD architecture of TeraScale. GCN requires considerably more transistors than TeraScale, but offers advantages for general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) computation due to a simpler compiler. GCN graphics chips were fabricated with CMOS at 28 nm, and with FinFET at 14 nm (by Samsung Electronics and GlobalFoundries) and 7 nm (by TSMC), available on selected models in AMD's Radeon HD 7000, HD 8000, 200, 300, 400, 500 and Vega series of graphics cards, including the separately released Radeon VII. GCN was also used in the graphics portion of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), including those in the PlayStation 4 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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AMD Radeon RX 400 Series
The Radeon 400 series is a series of graphics processors developed by AMD. These cards were the first to feature the Polaris GPUs, using the new 14 nm FinFET manufacturing process, developed by Samsung Electronics and licensed to GlobalFoundries. The Polaris family initially included two new chips in the Graphics Core Next (GCN) family (Polaris 11 and Polaris 12). Polaris implements the 4th generation of the Graphics Core Next instruction set, and shares commonalities with the previous GCN microarchitectures. Naming The RX prefix is used for cards that offer over 1.5 teraflops of performance and 80 GB/s of memory throughput (with memory compression), and achieve at least 60 FPS at 1080p in popular games such as ''Dota 2'' and ''League of Legends''. Otherwise, it will be omitted. Like previous generations, the first numeral in the number refers to the generation (4 in this case) and the second numeral in the number refers to the tier of the card, of which there are six. Tier 4 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Software Suite
A software suite (also known as an application suite) is a collection of computer programs (application software, or programming software) of related functionality, sharing a similar user interface and the ability to easily exchange data with each other. Features Advantages * Less costly than buying individual packages * Identical or very similar GUI * Designed to interface with each other * Helps the learning curve of the user Disadvantages * Not all purchased features are always used by the user * Takes a significant amount of disk space ( bloatware), as compared to buying only the needed packages * Requires effort to use the packages together Types * Office suites, such as Microsoft Office * Internet suites * Graphics suite, such as Adobe Creative Cloud * IDEs, such as Eclipse, and Visual Studio See also * Application software * Package (package management system) * Runtime environment In computer programming, a runtime system or runtime environment is a sub-sy ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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HotHardware
''HotHardware'' is an online publication about computer hardware, consumer electronics and related technologies, mobile computing and PC gaming. It regularly features coverage of new products and technologies from vendors including Intel, Dell, AMD, and NVIDIA. "Daily Hardware Round-ups" also offer reviews and news submitted by other technology-related sites. Content is organized by category and is searchable through a content management system (CMS), with a blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...-style comments section for registered users, and a web forum with integrated comments section, topic tagging/filing and a content rating system. Forum members can also take part in contests to win hardware that has been featured on the site. References External link ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ambient Occlusion
In 3D computer graphics, modeling, and animation, ambient occlusion is a shading and rendering technique used to calculate how exposed each point in a scene is to ambient lighting. For example, the interior of a tube is typically more occluded (and hence darker) than the exposed outer surfaces, and becomes darker the deeper inside the tube one goes. Ambient occlusion can be seen as an accessibility value that is calculated for each surface point. In scenes with open sky this is done by estimating the amount of visible sky for each point, while in indoor environments only objects within a certain radius are taken into account and the walls are assumed to be the origin of the ambient light. The result is a diffuse, non-directional shading effect that casts no clear shadows, but that darkens enclosed and sheltered areas and can affect the rendered image's overall tone. It is often used as a post-processing effect. Unlike local methods such as Phong shading, ambient occlusion i ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Visual Artifact
Visual artifacts (also artefacts) are anomalies apparent during visual representation as in digital graphics and other forms of imagery, especially photography and microscopy. In digital graphics * Image quality factors, different types of visual artifacts * Compression artifacts * Digital artifacts, visual artifacts resulting from digital image processing * Noise * Screen-door effect, also known as fixed-pattern noise (FPN), a visual artifact of digital projection technology * Ghosting (television) *Screen burn-in * Distortion * Silk screen effect * Rainbow effect * Screen tearing * MoirĂ© pattern * Color banding In video entertainment Many people who use their computers as a hobby experience artifacting due to a hardware or software malfunction. The cases can differ but the usual causes are: * Temperature issues, such as failure of cooling fan. * Unsuited video card (graphics card) drivers. * Drivers that have values that the graphics card is not suited with. * Overcl ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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DirectX
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, and so forth. The name ''DirectX'' was coined as a shorthand term for all of these APIs (the ''X'' standing in for the particular API names) and soon became the name of the collection. When Microsoft later set out to develop a Video game console, gaming console, the ''X'' was used as the basis of the name Xbox (console), Xbox to indicate that the console was based on DirectX technology. The ''X'' initial has been carried forward in the naming of APIs designed for the Xbox such as DirectInput, XInput and the Cross-platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT), while the DirectX pattern has been continued for Windows APIs such as Direct2D and DirectWrite. Direct3D (the 3D graphics A ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |