This is not a fact, this is your opinion
@sontin
Not sure why you are pretending that NV is promoting its tech as open source. If you refer to the GitHub, it was last updated in 2014, with only a few older effects for D3D, and not the CURRENT GameWorks libraries which remain closed source, obfuscated for most developers. Devs who want a look at the raw source code have to sign up and pay a fee to be able to optimize it.
The OpenGL stuff is primarily for Android development, their Shield device is struggling to get exclusives.. and so few big PC games are OpenGL and when they are, they don't use GW.
Don't forget that the biggest incentive that AMD gives is that they are using the MIT license. That license allows zero restrictions on a dev's customized code including SALE of the customized code. That is huge. Sourced to a slide in below article.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9853/amd-gpuopen-linux-open-source
The sale bothers me. It would mean that the modified code would see less adoption. Kind of hurts the benefits of GPUOpen.
I don't think it will end up like that. I see it more likely to be shared than to be put up behind a paywall. That is just the nature of where AMD has positioned itself. The allowance for charging is just for the coders that take the source and do serious amounts of work on it to the point that it might not look very much like the code they started from. In those cases I think it's reasonable to charge for your work. The fact that AMD chose the MIT license and not GPL or something else means they agree with that type of scenario.
The MIT license is extremely permissive. If you have a piece of MIT licensed code, you can freely take that code, incorporate it into a non-free-software product, distribute only binaries, and you'd be under no obligation to distribute any license or any type of source code whatesoever.Also, the MIT license transfers with the modified code although I do not know if it only applies to the base source or the fully modified code. I would hope the latter so we don't run into situations where lawsuits are filed for people coming up with the same or similar solutions.
So, most of their "Open" techniques require their proprietary toolset like the DepthBoundsTest11:
http://gpuopen.com/gaming-product/depthboundstest11-directx-11-sdk-sample/
AMD said:This library provides software developers with the ability to query AMD GPU software and hardware state information that is not normally available through standard operating system or graphic APIs. The library includes support for querying graphics driver version info, Crossfire (AMD’s multi-GPU rendering technology) configuration info, as well as Eyefinity (AMD’s multi-display rendering technology) configuration info. AGS is available in dynamic library form for 32 and 64 bit versions of Microsoft® Windows® 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. Latest version of AGS now exposes driver extensions.
So if AMD wants people to actually build, sell and buy things on it, they made a good call using MIT.
In my experience, the vast majority of companies won't even touch a library with any flavor of GPL, especially not v3, and not even LGPL many times. And customers won't buy your product if you have LGPL in it even if you've managed it correctly and you're in the clear. People just dont want the liability of any flavor of GPL. It's simply not worth the effort of managing it and the risk of screwing it up for many.
So if AMD wants people to actually build, sell and buy things on it, they made a good call using MIT.
They're especially good choices when proprietary software exists that fills a similar niche, and your free software will be competing with it. Some developers or companies might choose the proprietary software over the free software simply because the free software with, for example, a copyleft license puts requirements on them to redistribute source code.
It doesn't needed to port back the specific changes. One of the goal of GPUOpen is to make these effect fully accessible. Even if TressFX 3.0 is open source it is still a middleware level thing. It can be properly optimized for the actual rendered, but it can't be integrated deeply in the engine. This means AMD and their partners can use the R&D to make the effect better, but a simple integration may lead to high performance penalty. PureHair is the deeply integrated version of TressFX 3.0, and integration is the main goal to run this effect really fast.I note that "Pure Hair" in Tomb Raider 2 is modified TressFX (i.e. they took TressFX as a base and then made their own better version). I strongly suspect none of those changes will go back to any open source libraries but will be kept as Square Enix's intellectual property - it now belongs to them.
Any dev can do the same thing what Square Enix does. They can download TressFX 3.0, and integrate it deeply to the engine.AMD doesn't even get mentioned in relation to it in general TR2 advertising, and no other dev will benefit from that work.
PureHair is a very specific modification of TressFX 3.0. Even if Square Enix opens up the source it will be unusable for the other devs without the Crytal or Dawn Engine. If the other devs want TressFX 3.0 quality with PureHair speed, they need to this job by their own.This is the reality of what AMD's open source becomes. Sure it's a nice building block for someone, but it's not going to get updated by dev's as they will keep the changes and it's not going to help AMD.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/glimpse-of-the-purehair-hair-rendering-engine-at-gdc
I note that "Pure Hair" in Tomb Raider 2 is modified TressFX (i.e. they took TressFX as a base and then made their own better version). I strongly suspect none of those changes will go back to any open source libraries but will be kept as Square Enix's intellectual property - it now belongs to them. AMD doesn't even get mentioned in relation to it in general TR2 advertising, and no other dev will benefit from that work. All we read about is the other nvidia additions which because they are directly using nvidia libraries they have to credit nvidia. In addition Tomb Raider 2 including that Pure Hair now runs better on Nvidia hardware (it probably won't eventually but Nvidia released a driver for it in time for all the reviews and AMD didn't so all the review benchmarks now show Nvidia looking stronger).
This is the reality of what AMD's open source becomes. Sure it's a nice building block for someone, but it's not going to get updated by dev's as they will keep the changes and it's not going to help AMD.
It doesn't needed to port back the specific changes. One of the goal of GPUOpen is to make these effect fully accessible. Even if TressFX 3.0 is open source it is still a middleware level thing. It can be properly optimized for the actual rendered, but it can't be integrated deeply in the engine. This means AMD and their partners can use the R&D to make the effect better, but a simple integration may lead to high performance penalty. PureHair is the deeply integrated version of TressFX 3.0, and integration is the main goal to run this effect really fast.
Any dev can do the same thing what Square Enix does. They can download TressFX 3.0, and integrate it deeply to the engine.
PureHair is a very specific modification of TressFX 3.0. Even if Square Enix opens up the source it will be unusable for the other devs without the Crytal or Dawn Engine. If the other devs want TressFX 3.0 quality with PureHair speed, they need to this job by their own.
At least we have hair effects that work, and don't cause relatively huge performance hits between the IHV's. Isn't that what we want?
Hairworks works. And at least there are more options then "looking bad" and "looking worse than TR2013".
I want quality. Otherwise i wouldnt care about "simulating" hair in games. BTW the alpha blend hair of the NPCs in Rise looks much better than PureHair. A shame that Lara's standard hair is worse than the one in Tomb Raider Legend... :\
So, people are surprised devs aren't giving their updated AMD code back for all to use? Devs are scum. They steal from each other and wouldn't credit their mothers for their birth unless there was a buck in it.
At least we have hair effects that work, and don't cause relatively huge performance hits between the IHV's. Isn't that what we want?
While I can understand the devs not wanting to credit someone else, I think it's sad we have gamers not wanting to credit AMD with doing something good for gaming. This is exactly what they wanted to happen when they released the library. They've also asked that nVidia and Intel do the same. Looking at the example of TressFX, who here doesn't want this to happen? Well, if you do, support it. If you don't support it no other company will see any benefit and will feel completely justified continuing down the closed source back stabbing course they are on now.
Wow, developers are scum, huh? Without their hard work, you wouldn't have anything to play.
The ADF is going overboard at this point, IMO.
CodeXL is now part of the GPUOpen initiative. You can find all of CodeXLs source code (barring a few parts that are IP-confidential) on the CodeXL GitHub project. Version 2.0 is also available in pre-built binary form, like previous versions.
We believe that by adopting the open-source model and sharing the CodeXL source base with the world we can help developers make better use of CodeXL and make CodeXL a better tool.
To encourage 3rd party contribution and adoption, CodeXL is no longer branded as an AMD product. AMD will still continue development of this tool and upload new CodeXL versions and features to GPUOpen.
and FireRays 2.0,We are releasing TressFX 3.1. Our biggest update in this release is a new order-independent transparency (OIT) option we call ShortCut. Weve also addressed some of the issues brought up by the community.
and GeometryFX 1.2 Cluster CullingA New Milestone
After the success of the first version, FireRays is moving to another major milestone. We are open sourcing the entire library which allows complete integration and contribution from the entire developer community to bring improvements in the rendering world. In fact FireRays 2.0 brings support for Windows, OSX, Linux, AMD, NV, Intel GPUs and CPUs with many back-ends.
Todays update for GeometryFX introduces cluster culling. Previously, GeometryFX worked on a per-triangle level only. With cluster culling, GeometryFX is able to reject large chunks of the geometry with corresponding performance increases. Cluster culling is not a new idea last year at SIGGRAPH, Ubisoft presented a GPU based rendering pipeline which incorporated cluster culling as well.