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Huddy said that if developers think going around Direct X will help improve the performance of their GPUs, they can also turn to an alternative to Direct X that provides less in the way of stability. “High-end developers could use a different kind of API much more like Open CL that gets at just the computer hardware, but doesn’t have the notion of a Z-buffer,” he said. “The Z-buffer is the fundamental surface algorithm we apply to PCs. So long as you could extend Open CL to expose Z-buffering or texture-filtering, you could actually expose all of the hardware and greatly increase performance on current games.”
Aside from the technical challenges and the need to support different kinds of capability on AMD hardware, Robison said part of developing an ecosystem around the GPU involves acknowledging the mindset of software developers. “We love our game developers,” Robison said. “But there’s definitely a personality that goes along with being a really good game developer, and that’s the notion that ‘I can do everything better myself.’ In the quest for the ultimate PC gaming experience, there’s always that notion. But there are only a few people in the industry that could really handle the complexities of programming the hardware that Direct X takes care of for the vast majority of developers.”
Another aspect of developing the ecosystem, according to both Robison and Huddy, involves communicating what is needed to the software vendor, in this case Microsoft. “Yes we absolutely put pressure on Microsoft in the same way that they put pressure on us,” Huddy said. “This is an ecosystem.”
Huddy cited the words of an executive at rival chipmaker Intel to describe the mentality of GPU hardware vendors. “We live in a desperate situation, every day is a desperate situation for us,” Huddy said. “We require that our software partners make use of our silicon, otherwise we are creating dark silicon that no one gets value from,” Huddy said. “AMD needs to innovate, as a gaming company and as a CPU company. Microsoft needs to do the same thing. We’re making sure that the synergy between us is a highly cooperative one. If they were to say ‘graphics is a done deal’ that would be a big problem. They haven’t said that.”
Next: The Constant Need For Innovation
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