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Explore our continually-growing library of technical blogs, written by AMD engineers and guest game developers. Benefit from their valuable experience covering general development techniques, developing with AMD hardware, ray tracing, HPC, ML, Vulkan®, DirectX®, Unreal Engine®, and lots more. 

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the_page_IDBlog titleDescriptionOriginally postedAuthorpage_taxonomy_category
~ID-000140Optimized Reversible Tonemapper for ResolveOptimized tonemapper form of the technique Brian Karis talks about on Graphics Rants: Tone mapping. Replace the luma computation with max3(red,green,blue).26th January 2016Timothy LottesDeveloper guides
~ID-000237Getting the Most Out of Delta Color CompressionDCC is a domain-specific compression that tries to take advantage of data coherence. It’s lossless, and adapted for 3D rendering. The key idea is to process whole blocks instead of individual pixels.14th March 2016Chris BrennanDeveloper guides
~ID-001014Fetching From Cubes and OctahedronsFor GPU-side dynamically generated data structures which need 3D spherical mappings, two of the most useful mappings are cubemaps and octahedral maps. This post explores the overhead of both mappings.4th February 2016Timothy LottesDeveloper guides
~ID-001211Maxing Out GPU usage in nBodyGravityAsynchronous compute can help you to get the maximum GPU usage. I’ll be explaining the details based on the nBodyGravity sample from Microsoft.26th January 2016Matthäus ChajdasDeveloper guides
~ID-001861Understanding Memory Coalescing on GCNAn explanation of how GCN hardware coalesces memory operations to minimize traffic throughout the memory hierarchy.21st March 2016Timothy LottesDeveloper guides
~ID-002113Vulkan® RenderpassesRenderpasses are objects designed to allow an application to communicate the high-level structure of a frame to the driver.16th February 2016Graham SellersDeveloper guides
~ID-002362Using the Vulkan® Validation LayersVulkan validation layers make it easier to catch any mistakes, provide useful information beyond basic errors and minimize portability issues.9th March 2016Daniel RakosDeveloper guides
~ID-002779Unlock the Rasterizer with Out-of-Order RasterizationGCN hardware supports a special out-of-order rasterization mode which relaxes the ordering guarantee, and allows fragments to be produced out-of-order.17th May 2016Matthäus ChajdasDeveloper guides
~ID-002814Using Vulkan® Device MemoryThis post serves as a guide on how to best use the various Memory Heaps & Memory Types exposed in Vulkan on AMD drivers, starting with some high-level tips.21st July 2016Timothy LottesDeveloper guides
~ID-002901GCN Shader Extensions for Direct3D® and Vulkan®One of the mandates of GPUOpen is to give developers better access to the hardware, and this post details extensions for Vulkan and Direct3D12 that expose additional GCN features to developers.24th May 2016Matthäus ChajdasDeveloper guides
~ID-002904Fast Compaction with mbcntWith shader extensions, we provide access to a much better tool to get compaction done: GCN provides a special op-code for compaction within a wavefront.20th May 2016Matthäus ChajdasDeveloper guides
~ID-003532The Art of AMDGCN Assembly: How to Bend the Machine to Your WillThis article explains how to produce Hsaco from assembly code and also takes a closer look at some new features of the GCN architecture.29th June 2016Ben SanderDeveloper guides
~ID-003720Texel ShadingGame engines do most of their shading work per-pixel or per-fragment. But there is another alternative that has been popular in film for decades…21st July 2016Karl HilleslandDeveloper guides
~ID-003855Anatomy Of The Total War Engine: Part ITamas Rabel, Lead Graphics Programmer on the Total War series provides a detailed look at the Total War renderer as well as digging deep into some of the optimizations that the team at Creative Assembly did for the brilliant, Total War: Warhammer.27th July 2016Tamas RabelDeveloper guides
~ID-003859Vulkan® and DOOMThis post takes a look at the interesting bits of helping id Software with their DOOM Vulkan effort, from the perspective of AMD’s Game Engineering Team.10th November 2016Timothy LottesDeveloper guides
~ID-003919Anatomy Of The Total War Engine: Part IITamas Rabel from Creative Assembly discusses how performance was measured with the Total War Engine.3rd August 2016Tamas RabelDeveloper guides
~ID-003953AMD GCN Assembly: Cross-Lane OperationsCross-lane operations are an efficient way to share data between wavefront lanes. This article covers in detail the cross-lane features that GCN3 offers.10th August 2016Ben SanderDeveloper guides
~ID-004082Anatomy Of The Total War Engine: Part IIIHere’s Tamas Rabel again with some juicy details about how Creative Assembly brought Total War to DirectX® 12.10th August 2016Tamas RabelDeveloper guides
~ID-004145Anatomy Of The Total War Engine: Part IVTamas Rabel talks about how Total War: Warhammer utilized asynchronous compute to extract some extra GPU performance in DirectX® 12 and delves into the process of moving some of the passes in the engine to asynchronous compute pipelines.16th August 2016Tamas RabelDeveloper guides
~ID-004230Anatomy Of The Total War Engine: Part VThe final instalment in Tamas Rabel’s insight into developing the Total War engine looks at Multi-GPU.22nd August 2016Tamas RabelDeveloper guides
~ID-004290Using RapidFire for Virtual Desktop and Cloud GamingRapidFire SDK captures and encodes the input images entirely on the GPU and then copies the encoded result into the system memory for processing on the CPU.27th September 2016Bruno StefanizziDeveloper guides
~ID-004423Vulkan® Barriers ExplainedBarriers control resource and command synchronisation in Vulkan applications and are critical to performance and correctness. Learn more here.18th October 2016Matthäus ChajdasDeveloper guides
~ID-004487AMD Driver Symbol ServerHow to set up the AMD Driver Symbol Server in Visual Studio.27th October 2016Gareth ThomasDeveloper guides
~ID-004567Selecting the Best Graphics Device to Run a 3D Intensive Application3D intensive application performance may suffer greatly if the best graphics device is not selected. As a developer you can easily fix this problem by adding only one line to your executable’s source code.16th November 2016Ken MitchellDeveloper guides
~ID-004755Leveraging Asynchronous Queues for Concurrent ExecutionUnderstanding concurrency (and what breaks it) is extremely important when optimizing for modern GPUs.1st December 2016Stephan HodesDeveloper guides
~ID-004824Optimizing Terrain ShadowsOne thing which is often forgotten is shadow map rendering. As the tessellation level of the terrain is not optimized for the shadow camera, but for the primary camera, this often results in a very strong mismatch and shadow maps end up getting extremely over-tessellated.15th December 2016Matthäus ChajdasDeveloper guides
~ID-004861Profiling video memory with Windows® Performance AnalyzerA guide to using the Windows Performance Analyzer tool, with a focus on video resources.9th February 2017Cristian CutocherasDeveloper guides
~ID-005536Using Sub DWord Addressing on AMD GPUsSub DWord Addressing is a feature of the AMD GCN architecture which allows the efficient extraction of 8-bit and 16-bit values from a 32-bit register. 24th February 2017Aditya AtluriDeveloper guides
~ID-005567Live VGPR Analysis with Radeon™ GPU AnalyzerThis tutorial explains how to use Radeon GPU Analyzer (RGA) to produce a live VGPR analysis report for your shaders and kernels. Basic RGA usage knowledge is assumed.21st March 2017Amit Ben-MosheDeveloper guides
~ID-005928CPU Core Count Detection on Windows®Due to architectural differences between Zen and our previous processor architecture, Bulldozer, developers need to take care when using the Windows® APIs for processor and core enumeration.14th September 2017Ken MitchellDeveloper guides
~ID-005948Content Creation Tools and Multi-GPUmGPU isn’t just for gamers – if you’re a developer working on a game, you should think of using mGPU to make your life easier.5th May 2017Matthäus ChajdasDeveloper guides
~ID-006013Optimizing GPU occupancy and resource usage with large thread groupsSebastian Aaltonen, co-founder of Second Order Ltd, talks about how to optimize GPU occupancy and resource usage of compute shaders that use large thread groups.24th May 2017Sebastian AaltonenDeveloper guides
~ID-006359Understanding Vulkan® ObjectsAn important part of learning the Vulkan® API is to understand what types of objects are defined by it, what they represent and how they relate to each other.7th August 2017Adam SawickiDeveloper guides
~ID-006483Stable Barycentric CoordinatesThe AMD GCN Vulkan extensions allow developers to get access to the barycentric coordinates at the fragment-shader level.30th August 2017Rys SommefeldtDeveloper guides
~ID-006564First Steps When Implementing FP16Half-precision (FP16) computation is a performance-enhancing GPU technology long exploited in console and mobile devices not previously used or widely available in mainstream PC development.20th April 2018Tom HammersleyDeveloper guides
~ID-006609Deferred Path Tracing By EnscapeInsights from Enscape as to how they designed a renderer that produces path traced real time global illumination and can also converge to offline rendered image quality.6th December 2017Thomas SchanderDeveloper guides
~ID-006686Understanding GPU context rollsLearn what a context roll on our GPUs is, how they apply to the pipeline and how they’re managed, and what you can do to analyse them and find out if they’re a limiting factor in the performance of your game or application.29th June 2018Rys SommefeldtDeveloper guides
~ID-006834Reducing Vulkan® API call overheadThis guest post, by Arseny Kapoulkine from Roblox, looks at the costs associated with calling various Vulkan functions tens or hundreds of thousands of times per frame, and ways to bring them down.26th April 2018Arseny KapoulkineDeveloper guides
~ID-007019Decoding Radeon™ Vulkan® versionsA guide to using our machine-readable mapping that you can integrate into your software for decoding Radeon™ Vulkan® versions.2nd August 2018Rys SommefeldtDeveloper guides
~ID-007193Using Ryzen™ Threadripper for Game Development – optimising UE4 build timesGuest post by Sebastian Aaltonen, co-founder of Second Order. It covers optimising building the engine and asset production when using AMD Ryzen Threadripper processors.17th December 2018Sebastian AaltonenDeveloper guides
~ID-008277Integrating AMD FidelityFX™ into the Ego EngineTom Hammersley from Codemasters talks about integrating FidelityFX into the Ego Engine and implementing Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS).18th December 2019Tom HammersleyDeveloper guides
~ID-013579Integrating RenderDoc for Unconventional AppsOne of our engineers explains a few small code changes that can help you integrate RenderDoc for more unconventional applications.20th July 2020Matthäus ChajdasDeveloper guides
~ID-013823Porting Detroit: Become Human from PlayStation® 4 to PC – Part 3The final part of this joint series with Quantic Dream discusses shader scalarization, async compute, multithreaded render lists, memory management using our Vulkan Memory Allocator (VMA), and much more.25th September 2020Lou KramerDeveloper guides
~ID-013997Porting Detroit: Become Human from PlayStation® 4 to PC – Part 1Porting the PS4® game Detroit: Become Human to PC presented some interesting challenges. This first part of a joint collaboration from engineers at Quantic Dream and AMD discusses the decision to use Vulkan® and talks shader pipelines and descriptors.21st September 2020Lou KramerDeveloper guides
~ID-013998Porting Detroit: Become Human from PlayStation® 4 to PC – Part 2Part 2 of this joint post between Quantic Dream and AMD looks at non-uniform resource indexing on PC and for AMD cards specifically.23rd September 2020Lou KramerDeveloper guides
~ID-016632AMD Ryzen CPU Performance GuideDesign faster. Render faster. Iterate faster. Our one-stop resource for getting great AMD Ryzen performance.20th April 2021GPUOpenDeveloper guides
~ID-018196How to get the most out of Smart Access Memory (SAM)Smart Access Memory (SAM) provides the CPU with direct access to all video memory. These guidelines help you to improve CPU and GPU performance using SAM.15th June 2021Oskar HomburgDeveloper guides
~ID-020439Vulkan’s Best Practice layer now has AMD-specific checksIntroducing AMD checks for the Vulkan® Best Practice validation layer! Find out more about how it now incorporates many of our performance suggestions.2nd September 2021Nadav GevaDeveloper guides
~ID-021100Understanding Graphs in Radeon GPU Profiler and GPUViewFind out how to read and understand graphs in Radeon GPU Profiler and GPUView in order to optimize your game more effectively.3rd December 2021Adam SawickiDeveloper guides
~ID-024955Integrating VRS in The RiftbreakerEXOR Studios and AMD have collaborated to add Variable Rate Shading in The Riftbreaker. Read this guest blog to find out more!13th May 2022GPUOpenDeveloper guides
~ID-025067The “why” of multi-resolution geometric representation using Bounding Volume Hierarchy for ray tracingThe benefits of the level of details technique for ray tracing are not trivial. This blog explores the issues, giving the rationale for our new technique.9th May 2022Takahiro HaradaDeveloper guides
~ID-030236AMD matrix cores (amd-lab-notes)This first post in the ‘AMD lab notes’ series takes a look at AMD’s Matrix Core technology and how best to use it to speed up your matrix operations.14th November 2022amd-lab-notesDeveloper guides
~ID-030237Finite difference method – Laplacian part 1 (amd-lab-notes)The finite difference method is a powerful tool for computational physics. This post covers how to implement a GPU-accelerated finite difference code using AMD’s HIP API.14th November 2022amd-lab-notesDeveloper guides
~ID-036749Finite difference method – Laplacian part 2 (amd-lab-notes)In this post we introduce two common optimizations that can be applied to the kernel to reduce data movement and bring us closer to the new peak: loop tiling to explicitly reduce memory loads and re-order the memory access pattern to improve caching.4th January 2023amd-lab-notesDeveloper guides
~ID-037120AMD RDNA™ Performance GuideOur one-stop resource for getting great AMD RDNA™ performance on Vulkan® and DirectX®12 APIs!22nd March 2023RDNA Perf GuideDeveloper guides
~ID-038825AMD Instinct™ MI200 GPU memory space overview – amd-lab-notesThis post introduces commonly-used memory spaces, identifies what makes each memory space unique, and discusses some common use-cases for each space.9th March 2023amd-lab-notesDeveloper guides
~ID-038937Introduction to profiling tools for AMD hardware (amd-lab-notes)This post gives an overview of AMD’s open source profiling tools, helping you diagnose bottlenecks and understand how your application is using the hardware.12th April 2023amd-lab-notesDeveloper guides
~ID-039554Finite Difference Method – Laplacian part 3 – amd-lab-notesIn this third part, we cover additional optimizations to fine tune the performance of the kernel, and introduce temporary files, register pressure, and occupancy.11th May 2023amd-lab-notesDeveloper guides
~ID-039589Register pressure in AMD CDNA2™ GPUs – amd-lab-notesRegister pressure of GPU kernels has a tremendous impact on performance. This post provides a practical demo on applying recommendations.17th May 2023amd-lab-notesDeveloper guides
~ID-041858Getting Started – GPU Work GraphsFind out what you need to get started with Work Graphs for DirectX 12, including the software required, configuration, compiling, and more.22nd June 2023GPU Work GraphsDeveloper guides
~ID-041859GPU Work Graphs in Microsoft DirectX® 12Our primer on GPU Work Graphs introduces this exciting new paradigm for graphics developers, which enable a live shader kernel to dispatch new workloads on-demand without needing to circle back around to the CPU first.22nd June 2023GPU Work GraphsDeveloper guides
~ID-041860Building Blocks – GPU Work GraphsBuild upon what you learned in Part 1 of Work Graphs with topics such as input and output records, SV_DispatchGrid, NodeLaunch modes, and recursion.22nd June 2023GPU Work GraphsDeveloper guides
~ID-041861Tips and Tricks – GPU Work GraphsOur final part in our GPU Work Graphs primer shares tips and tricks, and links to where you can find out more.22nd June 2023GPU Work GraphsDeveloper guides
~ID-043432Pre-multiplication, left-handed coordinate system as in DirectX® 9 – Matrix CompendiumGPUOpen Matrix Compendium: This page shows a selection of matrices in the coordinate system expected by DirectX® 9.5th April 2023Matrix CompendiumDeveloper guides
~ID-043433Introduction – Matrix CompendiumThe GPUOpen Matrix Compendium covers how matrices are used in 3D graphics and implementations in host code and shading languages. It’s a growing guide, so keep checking back!5th April 2023Matrix CompendiumDeveloper guides
~ID-043434Pre-multiplication, right-handed coordinate system – Matrix CompendiumGPUOpen Matrix Compendium: This page shows a selection of matrices in a pre-multiplication, right-handed coordinate system.5th April 2023Matrix CompendiumDeveloper guides
~ID-043435Post-multiplication, right-handed coordinate system as in OpenGL® – Matrix CompendiumGPUOpen Matrix Compendium: This page shows a selection of matrices in the coordinate system expected by OpenGL®.5th April 2023Matrix CompendiumDeveloper guides
~ID-043436Post-multiplication, left-handed coordinate system – Matrix CompendiumGPUOpen Matrix Compendium: This page shows a selection of matrices in a post-multiplication, left-handed coordinate system.5th April 2023Matrix CompendiumDeveloper guides
~ID-044800Effective Use of the New D3D12_HEAP_TYPE_GPU_UPLOADThe D3D12_HEAP_TYPE_GPU_UPLOAD flag in Direct3D 12 provides a good alternative to other ways of uploading data from the CPU to the GPU. Check out our quick guide to effective use of this flag.17th July 2023GPUOpenDeveloper guides
~ID-044925Finite difference method – Laplacian part 4 – AMD lab notesIn the fourth and final part of Finite Difference Laplacian blog series we cover scaling studies and cache size limitations18th July 2023amd-lab-notesDeveloper guides
~ID-045076New Work Graphs sample & RGP support for GPU Work Graphs“D3D12SimpleClassify” shows the use of a GPU Work Graph in a simple frame-based graphics application, plus learn about new RGP support.29th August 2023GPUOpenDeveloper guides
~ID-045459CPU profiling for UnityThis is a general guide focusing on CPU profiling for Unity, including which tools are useful for profiling and how to use these tools to find hotspots in your code.5th January 2024GPUOpenDeveloper guides
~ID-046795Creating a PyTorch/TensorFlow Code Environment on AMD GPUs – AMD lab notesThe machine learning ecosystem is quickly exploding and this article is designed to assist data scientists/ML practitioners get their machine learning environments up and running on AMD GPUs.11th September 2023amd-lab-notesDeveloper guides
~ID-053039Work graphs API – compute rasterizer learning sampleLearn more about the power of work graphs API in our detailed blog, taking you step-by-step through an example which implements a scanline rasterizer.13th October 2023GPUOpenDeveloper guides
~ID-053450Sparse matrix vector multiplication – part 1 – AMD lab notesSparse matrix vector multiplication (SpMV) is a core computational kernel of nearly every implicit sparse linear algebra solver. This is the first post in the series covering SpMV.3rd November 2023amd-lab-notesDeveloper guides
~ID-053666How do I become a graphics programmer? – A small guide from the AMD Game Engineering teamIt is often difficult to know where to start when taking your first in the world of graphics. This guide is here to help with a discussion of first steps and a list of useful websites.22nd November 2023GPUOpenDeveloper guides
~ID-053703Occupancy explainedIn this blog post we will try to demystify what exactly occupancy is, which factors limit occupancy, and how to use tools to identify occupancy-limited workloads.20th December 2023GPUOpenDeveloper guides
~ID-055299Unreal Engine performance guideOur one-stop guide to performance with Unreal Engine.14th December 2023GPUOpenDeveloper guides
~ID-055680From vertex shader to mesh shader – Mesh shaders on AMD RDNA™ graphics cardsThis post is the start of a new series which aims to demystify mesh shaders through examples and tutorials.19th December 2023mesh_shadersDeveloper guides
~ID-055681Optimization and best practices – Mesh shaders on AMD RDNA™ graphics cardsThe second post in this series on mesh shaders covers best practices for writing mesh and amplification shaders, as well as how to use the AMD Radeon™ Developer Tool Suite to profile and optimize mesh shaders.16th January 2024mesh_shadersDeveloper guides
~ID-055682Mesh shaders on AMD RDNA™ graphics cardsThis blog series provides detailed explanations, analysis, use-case examples, tutorials, and advice about mesh shading.19th December 2023mesh_shadersDeveloper guides
~ID-056612Font and vector-art rendering with mesh shaders – Mesh shaders on AMD RDNA™ graphics cardsThe third post in our mesh shaders series covers how to use mesh shaders to simplify font rendering.13th March 2024mesh_shadersDeveloper guides
~ID-056763Procedural grass rendering – Mesh shaders on AMD RDNA™ graphics cardsThe fourth post in our mesh shaders series takes a look at the specific example of rendering detailed vegetation.20th March 2024mesh_shadersDeveloper guides
~ID-056991Affinity part 1 – Affinity, placement, and order – AMD lab notesThis first part introduces the concept of affinity and why its important for achieving better performance on AMD GPU nodes17th April 2024amd-lab-notesDeveloper guides
~ID-056992Affinity part 2 – System topology and controlling affinity – AMD lab notesThis second part introduces common tools to understand the topology of your system and to control affinity for different applications17th April 2024amd-lab-notesDeveloper guides
~ID-057250Preface to the CPU performance optimization guideThis article starts a series of posts about CPU performance analysis and optimization methods.18th June 2024CPU Performance Optimization GuideDeveloper guides
~ID-057251CPU performance optimization guide – part 1 – branch prediction18th June 2024CPU Performance Optimization GuideDeveloper guides
~ID-063162CPU performance optimization guide – part 2 – cache invalidation18th November 2024CPU Performance Optimization GuideDeveloper guides
~ID-064452CPU performance optimization guide – part 4Optimize CPU performance by manually writing x64 assembly code, offering a detailed comparison with compiler-generated instructions and achieving improved performance through streamlined instruction sets.25th March 2025CPU Performance Optimization GuideDeveloper guides
~ID-064456CPU performance optimization guide – part 3We look at optimizing CPU performance by reducing the number of instructions, and highlights methods to enhance instruction efficiency and algorithm throughput.25th March 2025CPU Performance Optimization GuideDeveloper guides

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