AMD Acquires Software Company HiAlgo, Laying Groundwork for Future Gaming Innovation in Radeon Softw

[HardOCP News]

AMD today announced the acquisition of software company HiAlgo Inc., a developer of unique PC gaming technologies designed to help Radeon™ RX Series GPUs transform gaming experience, increase GPU efficiency and improve the overall consistency of gaming experiences. The acquisition lays the groundwork for future gaming innovation in Radeon Software that will benefit owners of Radeon™ RX Series GPUs.

“Software is an integral part of advancing the science of graphics, enabling us to best harness the silicon of the GPU to maximize performance and deliver outstanding experiences in games and applications,” said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. “HiAlgo embodies our spirit of passion, persistence and play by delivering a number of creative approaches to software that improve gamers’ experiences, and helps future-proof the GPU.”

Radeon Software enables the ultimate in performance, features and stability of Radeon™ graphics to ensure an exceptional user experience. Today, launching alongside the Radeon™ RX 480 graphics card are nine new features of Radeon Software Crimson Edition designed to give users more control over their computing experience, including multi-GPU, display, and power efficiency settings, and a redefined overclocking tool in Radeon WattMan.

 

[fuzzylogik]

so... uhh... the company makes software that adjusts the resolution of a game in real-time to keep the fps steady? Is that correct what i'm understanding?

 

[Cr4ckm0nk3y]

so... uhh... the company makes software that adjusts the resolution of a game in real-time to keep the fps steady? Is that correct what i'm understanding?

Essentially yes! They also have software that drops settings to keep your machine from getting too hot. Essentially Boost/Chill etc are aimed at lower end hardware.

I tried boost a while ago with FC3 so I could play on a low end machine and found it was annoying. Between the crashes, logo in corner, and constant blur/un-blur it was just not usable. It reminded me of gaming after a lot of drinking.

Most performance mod packs or tweak guides already available do a better job.

With that, AMD has the money to invest in the software and with their latest low end GPU push it could be an excellent utility for AMD to include. Will it revolutionize gaming, no, but it could make some low end cards passable if all the bugs are ironed out.

 

[cyclone3d]

so... uhh... the company makes software that adjusts the resolution of a game in real-time to keep the fps steady? Is that correct what i'm understanding?

The "Boost" feature lowers the res while you are moving and then returns it to full resolution when you stop.

Sounds like it has to be tweaked for each game though.

If you watch the side by side video on their page, it does some other stuff as well since the fps were higher with "Boost" running.

They say it intercepts the instructions that are being sent to the graphics card and does some optimization.

HiAlgo Home

 

[evilsofa]

Their website looks scammy to me (ugh, that cat). But then I grew up with all of those RAMDoubler and CPUDoubler and SpeedDoubler and DiskDoubler and FPSDoubler and doubler this and doubler that and those almost always turned out to be scams. I think one or two were actually legit but I can't be bothered to remember which ones.

 

[cyclone3d]

Their website looks scammy to me (ugh, that cat). But then I grew up with all of those RAMDoubler and CPUDoubler and SpeedDoubler and DiskDoubler and FPSDoubler and doubler this and doubler that and those almost always turned out to be scams. I think one or two were actually legit but I can't be bothered to remember which ones.

The RAMDoubler ones basically compressed the data before storing it in RAM and/or would make a swap file like Windows does.

One or two of the CPU speedup programs worked.. but I am pretty sure that all they did was change some cache timings or something.

And then there were the DiskDoubler programs. They just compressed the data on the drive and then when you needed to open it up, it would take longer because it had to uncompress the data so you could use it. After Microsoft started incorporating this option into Windows, those programs went away.

 

[pcgeekesq]

With that, AMD has the money to invest in the software ...

AMD has money? What year do you think this is? AMD lost 660 million dollars last year on revenue of about $4 billion. They have $4 billion dollars in contractual obligations (primarily notes with 6.75% to 7.75% interest rates - junk bond territory) that will require them to pay out $930 million dollars in 2016 alone. There gross margin as 27% compared to Intel and Nvidia who have 55+% gross margins. All this adds up to them having stockholder's equity of negative 400 million dollars.

And you think they have money? No, they just have people willing to loan them money at high interest rates.

 

[Cr4ckm0nk3y]

AMD has money? What year do you think this is? AMD lost 660 million dollars last year on revenue of about $4 billion. They have $4 billion dollars in contractual obligations (primarily notes with 6.75% to 7.75% interest rates - junk bond territory) that will require them to pay out $930 million dollars in 2016 alone. There gross margin as 27% compared to Intel and Nvidia who have 55+% gross margins. All this adds up to them having stockholder's equity of negative 400 million dollars.

And you think they have money? No, they just have people willing to loan them money at high interest rates.

And? They have been losing money hand over fist for years. It doesn't mean they don't have operating capital for R&D. AMD has been eating up their last refi cash reserves for a while to keep the lights on.

My statement had nothing to do with the health of AMD, which has been shaky at best. AMD has more entities capably of investing/loaning money than HiAlgo ever had. Thus AMD has money to invest into HiAlgo's tech and hopefully make it a better software.

 

[NKD]

Kaduri ain't fucking around. He is doing a firesale on rx 480 and he is in vega mode. Hi may have told everyone to fuck off and let him do his thing.

AMD bought something, lol. Color me surprised.

 

[Zion Halcyon]

I have a feeling AMD bought this company not for the company, but for the tech. This could be something that goes hand in hand with freesync, with the goal of delivering a dynamic gaming experience that is always completely smooth.

I'd look for this stuff to be integrated into a later version of drivers rather than being standalone AMD apps.