WYP
News Guru
On Tuesday PCPER interviewed AMDs Gaming Scientist Richard Huddy to discuss the future of gaming. The entire interview is below but here I have for you some of the most noteworthy thing said there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uoD8YKwtww
Who is Richard Huddy?
Richard is new addition to AMD but not new to the industry, he started out with 3DLabs in 1996 and has had jobs at NVIDIA, ATI, Intel and has now returned to AMD.
The role of Gaming Scientist is to directly interface with the software developers for gaming and make sure that the GPU hardware designers are working hand in hand with future, high end graphics technology. Essentially his job is to make sure AMD continues to move and develop on the hardware side in a way which facilitates innovation the software side.
A large amount of the discussion was around the recent controversy surrounding Nvidia's Gameworks program, particularly that Nvidia hasn't openly released the SDK as source code and how that can lead to a future where gameworks titles could greatly benefit Nvidia's performance over AMDs.
At present Gameworks source code is only seen by relatively few developers, with many devs simply not having access, and those that do unable to share it with AMD. Devs and AMD working with what is termed as a "Black Box" makes it extremely difficult to optimize for AMD or other hardware. Huddy's solution to this problem is for Nvidia to simply and openly offer source code to everyone, so that everyone can optimize and improve the performance of Gameworks and the games it creates.
An idea within AMD is to create an open source licence-free competitor to gameworks. It will essentially work in the same way as the Linux group where anyone can submit changes or improvements to the code so that it can be used by everyone else, so performance improvements for specific hardware can be done easily and performance degrading on others can be easily changed and updated.
"OpenWorks" is still in the planning stages and AMD is only officially "talking about it" internally. Huddy believes that other hardware companies like Qualcomm or Intel would want to participate in such an open system but the real question is whether or not NVIDIA would, given that it is in direct competition to their own Gameworks, which they retain full control over.
The Next Big discussion was on AMD's Mantle API, which while is undoubtedly a game changer, which likely inspired Direct X 12 and undoubtedly forced Nvidia to focus on improving their Direct X 11 performance.
Unlike many of AMDs other technologies or SDKs they currently do not offer source code for Mantle but only give it to a select group of software developers and only develop for AMD's GCN architecture.
Huddy said that AMD is committed to release a public SDK for AMD Mantle by the end of 2014, which will allowother hardware manufacturers (Intel and Nvidia) to create a driver which will allow them to run Mantle games.
If AMD are speaking the truth here and offer full source code, Nvidia could support Mantle games on Geforce hardware but it is likely that a mixture of pride and industry politics will get in the way of this.
When talking about AMDs input SteamOS, Huddy said that AMD were considering bringing Mantle to Linux/SteamOS as several developers were requesting it/were interested in it. It will be interesting if Mantle does come to SteamOS as currently Open GL is the only thing that supports gaming in SteamOS and DirectX will never be ported to a Non-Microsoft OS.
What do you guys think of what was said in the interview? Would you like to see "Openworks" to happen or for AMD to bring Mantle to Linux? Please comment below.
Source - PCPER
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uoD8YKwtww
Who is Richard Huddy?
Richard is new addition to AMD but not new to the industry, he started out with 3DLabs in 1996 and has had jobs at NVIDIA, ATI, Intel and has now returned to AMD.
The role of Gaming Scientist is to directly interface with the software developers for gaming and make sure that the GPU hardware designers are working hand in hand with future, high end graphics technology. Essentially his job is to make sure AMD continues to move and develop on the hardware side in a way which facilitates innovation the software side.
A large amount of the discussion was around the recent controversy surrounding Nvidia's Gameworks program, particularly that Nvidia hasn't openly released the SDK as source code and how that can lead to a future where gameworks titles could greatly benefit Nvidia's performance over AMDs.
At present Gameworks source code is only seen by relatively few developers, with many devs simply not having access, and those that do unable to share it with AMD. Devs and AMD working with what is termed as a "Black Box" makes it extremely difficult to optimize for AMD or other hardware. Huddy's solution to this problem is for Nvidia to simply and openly offer source code to everyone, so that everyone can optimize and improve the performance of Gameworks and the games it creates.
An idea within AMD is to create an open source licence-free competitor to gameworks. It will essentially work in the same way as the Linux group where anyone can submit changes or improvements to the code so that it can be used by everyone else, so performance improvements for specific hardware can be done easily and performance degrading on others can be easily changed and updated.
"OpenWorks" is still in the planning stages and AMD is only officially "talking about it" internally. Huddy believes that other hardware companies like Qualcomm or Intel would want to participate in such an open system but the real question is whether or not NVIDIA would, given that it is in direct competition to their own Gameworks, which they retain full control over.
The Next Big discussion was on AMD's Mantle API, which while is undoubtedly a game changer, which likely inspired Direct X 12 and undoubtedly forced Nvidia to focus on improving their Direct X 11 performance.
Unlike many of AMDs other technologies or SDKs they currently do not offer source code for Mantle but only give it to a select group of software developers and only develop for AMD's GCN architecture.
Huddy said that AMD is committed to release a public SDK for AMD Mantle by the end of 2014, which will allowother hardware manufacturers (Intel and Nvidia) to create a driver which will allow them to run Mantle games.
If AMD are speaking the truth here and offer full source code, Nvidia could support Mantle games on Geforce hardware but it is likely that a mixture of pride and industry politics will get in the way of this.
When talking about AMDs input SteamOS, Huddy said that AMD were considering bringing Mantle to Linux/SteamOS as several developers were requesting it/were interested in it. It will be interesting if Mantle does come to SteamOS as currently Open GL is the only thing that supports gaming in SteamOS and DirectX will never be ported to a Non-Microsoft OS.
What do you guys think of what was said in the interview? Would you like to see "Openworks" to happen or for AMD to bring Mantle to Linux? Please comment below.
Source - PCPER
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