AMD has announced GPUOpen - its answer to NVIDIA's GameWorks. In a nutshell, AMD is releasing a slew of open-source software and tools to give developers of games, heterogeneous applications, and HPC applications deeper access to the GPU and GPU resources. GPUOpen will be published in January 2016, and AMD will use the permissive MIT license, allowing GPUOpen code to be used without any real restriction in all kinds of applications. The code will be published on GitHub. Making GPUOpen open source should make AMD's library more appealing to developers. The likes of TressFX and GameWorks are restricted (not open source), which often forces developers to optimize their games for one brand of GPUs more than the other. AMD is hoping to kill this hassle, and allow developers to use their open source library to optimize their games for both set of GPUs.

While this may seem like AMD yielding to its more influential counter-part, in reality it's the developers who are the winners with this move. Nvidia's GameWorks library is constantly being updated, and it so often happens that the codes developers are debugging will run differently on end-user systems because their code has quickly become obsolete. GPUOpen attempts to slay this issue and give total control to developers, who won't need to integrate multiple libraries, nor leave either one of the GPU vendors at a performance/visual disadvantage. GPUOpen will also contain a set of SDKs such as a AMD's FireRender engine, ray tracing SDK, and its RapidFire cloud SDK. It will also include the AMD CodeXL debuggers and performance profiler.