AMD GPUOpen Working On A New "gpurt" Open-Source Project
A Phoronix reader pointed out that AMD has setup GPUOpen-Drivers/gpurt as a new GitHub project in the past week. As of writing the only commit to this public repository is the LICENSE file that notes it's MIT licensed -- not a surprise and pretty much standard among most of AMD's open-source projects.
One of the immediate thoughts is that it could be AMD finally providing open-source Vulkan ray-tracing support. While AMD's proprietary Vulkan drivers on Windows and Linux with the Radeon Software package do support the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions, that isn't the case with their open-source "AMDVLK" driver hosted under the GPUOpen-Drivers umbrella. But plumbing the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions into AMDVLK should require changes to just the existing AMDVLK driver repositories and their LLVM-based "LLPC" compiler. (Separately and outside of AMD, the Mesa "RADV" Vulkan driver already does expose Vulkan ray-tracing support too.) Or gpurt is perhaps some new ray-tracing related helper library of sorts.
RT in computing could also refer to "real-time", but that seems less likely so with GPUOpen more focused on game developers and other use-cases with RT in the graphics context these days generally being about ray-tracing. In any event we should soon find out what AMD will be committing to this "gpurt" project.
In other AMD open-source news, other AMD Git activity today is pointing to an imminent ROCm 5.2 release.
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