What to attend at GDC; AMD Compress 2.2, Vulkan, Boltzmann, VR World Congress

WELCOME TO AMD DEVELOPER NEWS March 2016 | Previous Issues

The Year of Explicit APIs! What to Attend at GDC 2016.  One of the most important events for game developers is just around the corner! Join us in San Francisco March 14-18 for GDC 2016. Not sure what to attend? Check out this list of key sessions.   AMD Compress 2.2 Delivers Enhanced GUI & New Features The new GUI gives you plenty of room to customize for quality and performance by controlling how the tools apply different compression techniques. In addition, the GUI can handle 32-bit fixed- and floating-point texture images, and can compress to numerous formats. See what else is new and download this just released version.   Say Hello to a New Rendering API in Town Imagine that you were asked one day to design an API with bleeding-edge graphics hardware in mind. It would need to be as efficient as possible, support both immediate and tiler rendering architectures, be compatible with all major operating systems, and provide a level of functionality comparable to competitive APIs already on the market. Imagine. . .   GPUOpen Blog Series #1: Command lists Welcome to the first in a series of GPUOpen blog posts covering performance advice for Direct3D® 12 & Vulkan™. This post looks at (you guessed it) command lists – a feature which is only present in explicit APIs that expose fairly directly the DMA command buffer architecture of most modern 3D hardware.   Are you a ninja developer? Got an answer for a newbie? Got a question to stump your friends? Pop over to the AMD developer forums and throw in your two cents. CONFERENCE & EVENTS◢ GDC 2016 San Francisco, California Mar 14-18, 2016 IWOCL 2016 Vienna, Austria, April 19-21, 2016 VR World Congress Bristol, UK April 12, 2016 with AMD Keynote Khronos Vulkan Chapter Meeting AMD Munich Office April 8, 2016 TRAINING & EDUCATION◢ OpenCL Training in Munichwith Acceleware, Sept. 2016 OpenCL Training in Calgarywith Acceleware, Dec. 2016 Edinburg Napier University OpenCL™ courses Webinars & Tutorials – From AMD Developer Central Visit AMD's Training Partners for more training options or to schedule a customized training session VR Developer Technology Engineer North America & Europe Technical Lead, Graphics Bavaria, Germany

Getting Started with ROCm (Boltzmann): Components, Platforms & Installation The Boltzmann initiative exposes cutting edge compute capabilities and features on targeted AMD Radeon™ discrete GPUs through an open source software stack. The Boltzmann stack is comprised of several components based on open standards, but extended so important hardware capabilities are not hidden by the implementation. This blog gives an overview of the base components, how they are installed and how a Boltzmann platform should be properly configured.   Radeon™ Software Beta for Vulkan™ Update We've just updated our Vulkan™ API beta developer driver. Find out what's new and get the latest download.   Vulkan™ Renderpasses In Vulkan, a renderpass object contains the structure of the frame. In its simplest form, a renderpass encapsulates the set of framebuffer attachments, basic information about pipeline state and not much more. However, a renderpass can contain one or more subpasses and information about how those subpasses relate to one another. This is where things get interesting.   See You at VR World Congress, April 12  Whether you're a newcomer to VR, a seasoned professional, or a developer looking for VR development information, you'll find plenty of topics to suit you at this year's VR World Congress in Bristol, U.K. AMD is a headline sponsor! Be sure to catch the keynote by Roy Taylor, Corporate VP, Content & Alliances, for the AMD Radeon Technology Group. See you there!   GPUOpen Fuels Seismic Supercomputing Efforts for Geoscience Leader CGG CGG, a global geophysical services and equipment company, has deployed AMD FirePro™ S9150 server GPUs to accelerate its geoscience oil and gas research efforts, harnessing more than 1 PetaFLOPS of GPU processing power. Employing AMD's HPC GPU Computing open source software tools available on GPUOpen.com, CGG rapidly converted its in-house Nvidia CUDA code to OpenCL™ for seismic data processing.   Join us for a Vulkan™ Chapter Meeting in Munich Join local developers and learn about Vulkan over refreshments at the AMD Munich office, April 8, where we are proud to host a Khronos Munich Chapter meeting.