Pushing all this to open source is the way to go IMO.
Proprietary crap hurts gamers, doesn't help them.
I shudder to think where we would be today on the PC if OpenGL was the standard instead of DX.
Pushing all this to open source is the way to go IMO.
Proprietary crap hurts gamers, doesn't help them.
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.
Here is another thing that AMD is opening up...
https://radeon-prorender.github.io/
It really is too bad that nvidia is all talk, they did say they were going to open things up, but, since they made that announcement, we see how "open" they are, which is to say, not much has changed with them.
I shudder to think where we would be today on the PC if OpenGL was the standard instead of DX.
Pushing all this to open source is the way to go IMO.
Proprietary crap hurts gamers, doesn't help them.
They need to get rid of either 'helps' or the s from the end of 'reduces' in the third paragraph. Maybe i'm a little OCD about this stuff.
I disagree, only reason AMD does open source is cause they are pants at implementing their own code.
This way, they can promise the world as per normal and let OS do the work for them...
Anvil is a cross-platform, open-source, MIT-licensed wrapper library for Vulkan™, developed by AMD engineers. It has been designed with the goal of reducing the amount of time that developers need to spend in order to write a working Vulkan application from scratch. As such, not only does the library provide the usual C++ wrappers one would expect, but also includes extra features, as described below:
TressFX
Effects
The TressFX library implements AMD’s TressFX hair/fur rendering and simulation technology. The TressFX technology uses the GPU to simulate and render high-quality, realistic hair and fur. TressFX makes use of the processing power of high-performance GPUs to do realistic rendering and utilizes DirectCompute to physically simulate each individual strand of hair.
Highlights
New in TressFX 4
- GCN-optimized rendering and simulation
- Hair and fur support, with high quality anti-aliasing
- Animation/skinning support
- Two options for order-independent transparency
- Maya plugin provided for authoring
- Full source code provided
- Hair is skinned directly, rather than through triangle stream-out.
- Signed distance field (SDF) collision, including compute shaders to generate the SDF from a dynamic mesh.
- New system for handling fast motion.
- Refactored to be more engine / API agnostic.
- Example code includes compute-based skinning and marching cubes generation.
- DirectX 12 support, with an example for async compute