GPUOpen Celebrates Another Day Of Its Relaunch With A New Binary-Only Software Release

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GPUOpen Celebrates Another Day Of Its Relaunch With A New Binary-Only Software Release

AMD this week marked the relaunch of GPUOpen as their resource for creators and game developers with their collection of open-source/open-standards minded offerings on the graphics front. In honor of their relaunch, they said they would be issuing new software releases every day this week. It was a bit odd yesterday with Radeon Rays 4.0 dropping their open-source code-base and today they are introducing another new utility that is also binary-only...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GPUOpen-RMV-Binary-Release

[Debunez]

A new version of the Radeon Developer Panel (v2.0) also released alongside RMV with support for capturing RMV traces.

https://github.com/GPUOpen-Tools/radeon_developer_panel

Support for Radeon GPU Profiler is missing in 2.0 but will *hopefully* come soon

[Termy]

I really hope that doesn't indicate a new direction AMD is going

[muncrief]

Well, when AMD includes multiple closed source binaries in "GPUOpen" I think it's safe to say that AMD is abandoning open source. However it appears they're going to do it slowly, a step at a time. As an announcement explicitly declaring their intentions would cause quite a bit of discord.

And justifiably so, as many like me have stuck with AMD for decades even when the performance of their products was dismal. For example, I've loyally stood by them since the K7, even persisting during the Bulldozer fiasco, and all of their lesser performing GPUs.

[Danny3]

WTF, whey aren't they just changing the name to GPUclosed if that's the direction they want to go ?
I was waiting to buy RDNA2 GPUs, but if that's where they're going, I'm not interested, and I will probably switch to nvidia for better everything, hardwar, sofware, compute...

[fuzz]

I don't have an issue with any of their secret sauce developer tools being closed source. I prefer open source, but eh, I wont get upset about it.

As long as the drivers etc are open, I'm satisfied.

[cb88]

Well, when AMD includes multiple closed source binaries in "GPUOpen" I think it's safe to say that AMD is abandoning open source. However it appears they're going to do it slowly, a step at a time. As an announcement explicitly declaring their intentions would cause quite a bit of discord.

And justifiably so, as many like me have stuck with AMD for decades even when the performance of their products was dismal. For example, I've loyally stood by them since the K7, even persisting during the Bulldozer fiasco, and all of their lesser performing GPUs.

Note that many of the things on GPUOpen existed for awhile before AMD Opened them up.... it's pretty normal for a first release to get out before a legal team has time to vet all the source is OK to release.

If they never release source... then GPUOpen is false advertisement.

[cb88]

Well, when AMD includes multiple closed source binaries in "GPUOpen" I think it's safe to say that AMD is abandoning open source. However it appears they're going to do it slowly, a step at a time. As an announcement explicitly declaring their intentions would cause quite a bit of discord.

And justifiably so, as many like me have stuck with AMD for decades even when the performance of their products was dismal. For example, I've loyally stood by them since the K7, even persisting during the Bulldozer fiasco, and all of their lesser performing GPUs.

The only things there that are binary only are slowly being replaced and obsoleted... so what is your point. It's a fact that AMD's stack has had things in it they could not release.

[agd5f]

There have always been some tools on the site that are binaries.

[Peter Fodrek]

I will believe that this is what I call mix force. Closed source just until new produkt is launched for market then open sourced. So close source to protect IP but enable zero day support of new product