AMD's GPUOpen Announces ADLX Library But For Now It's Windows-Only

AMD's GPUOpen group has announced the AMD Device Library eXtra "ADLX" software development kit intended to help improve integration with third-party software. While nice in theory, for now at least it's Windows-only.

The ADLX SDK is intended to monitor and control many features around AMD graphics hardware such as FreeSync, color settings, resolution management, vertical sync, performance boosting functionality, GPU power consumption and temperature management, GPU fan speeds, vRAM tuning, fan tuning, and other common GPU adjustments.

The ADLX SDK sounds a lot like NVIDIA's existing NVAPI interface for managing NVIDIA GPUs on Windows and Linux. But with the ADLX SDK, it's currently Windows-only. It's not clear either if AMD intends to port ADLX to Linux given that for the most part is adapting to a different set of platform-specific APIs. Even if AMD were to target Linux support they would likely, for example, focus on their PRO and AMDVLK drivers rather than the Mesa RADV driver compatibility, etc. Though if AMD ADLX gets picked up by popular games we'll see if anyone implements a compatibility layer for Linux akin to DXVK-NVAPI that gets Windows NVAPI-enabled games working well on the NVIDIA Linux driver.

More details on the ADLX SDK can be found via GPUOpen.com. The SDK headers, sample code, and documentation can be found on GitHub.