cageymaru
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AMD Brings More Console Features To PC Gaming With New "Shader Intrinsic Functions" For GPUOpen.
AMD Brings More Console Features To PC Gaming With New "Shader Intrinsic Functions" For GPUOpen
Darn good article and I barely scratched the surface of it in my preview. Please go read it in it's entirety! This also applies to Nvidia since it is published in GPUOPEN. Nvidia already has the capabilities according to the article. I think game engines could really benefit from this. That way it could be baked into the engine for many future titles to reap the benefits. Easier console ports benefit everyone equally.
As a result, Advanced Micro Devices is introducing many new features within their GPUOpen program to enable more low-level access to hardware in a console-like development environment. If you are unfamiliar with GPUOpen, I wrote on that here. AMD is introducing the support for what is called “Shader Intrinsic Functions” or built-in functions which allow the developer to directly access graphics hardware instructions. This access is granted to developers in situations where they would normally be abstracted by a higher level API, or not available at all. Advanced Micro Devices likens this to embedding optimized machine language code into higher-level code.
In addition to improving performance on Advanced Micro Devices GPUs, the addition of intrinsic functions into GPUOpen also improves the compatibility of this feature. Because the addition of intrinsic functions is expected to run as a part of GPUOpen and exist on the PC platform, it will be supported in all the major PC APIs including Microsoft DirectX 11, DirectX 12 and even Vulkan.
As far as we can tell, NVIDIA NVDA +2.26% also has support for intrinsic functions inside of their GPUs as well, but they seem to be more focused on CUDA code and not for game development.
AMD Brings More Console Features To PC Gaming With New "Shader Intrinsic Functions" For GPUOpen
Darn good article and I barely scratched the surface of it in my preview. Please go read it in it's entirety! This also applies to Nvidia since it is published in GPUOPEN. Nvidia already has the capabilities according to the article. I think game engines could really benefit from this. That way it could be baked into the engine for many future titles to reap the benefits. Easier console ports benefit everyone equally.
As a result, Advanced Micro Devices is introducing many new features within their GPUOpen program to enable more low-level access to hardware in a console-like development environment. If you are unfamiliar with GPUOpen, I wrote on that here. AMD is introducing the support for what is called “Shader Intrinsic Functions” or built-in functions which allow the developer to directly access graphics hardware instructions. This access is granted to developers in situations where they would normally be abstracted by a higher level API, or not available at all. Advanced Micro Devices likens this to embedding optimized machine language code into higher-level code.
In addition to improving performance on Advanced Micro Devices GPUs, the addition of intrinsic functions into GPUOpen also improves the compatibility of this feature. Because the addition of intrinsic functions is expected to run as a part of GPUOpen and exist on the PC platform, it will be supported in all the major PC APIs including Microsoft DirectX 11, DirectX 12 and even Vulkan.
As far as we can tell, NVIDIA NVDA +2.26% also has support for intrinsic functions inside of their GPUs as well, but they seem to be more focused on CUDA code and not for game development.