AMD Adds Four New Graphics Technologies to FidelityFX via refreshed GPUOpen initiative

AMD issued a blog post announcing the relaunch of GPUOpen with a brand new re-design for developers, continuing its commitment to innovation through open standards. To celebrate, the company is releasing new GPUOpen tools and technologies every day this week.

The first GPUOpen release includes the expansion of AMD FidelityFX, an open-source toolkit that makes it easier for developers to add high-quality post-process effects to games. The four new effects added to the toolkit improve rendering quality and performance.

FEMFX is AMDs open-source CPU library for deformable material physics, using the Finite Element Method (FEM) and is available as source code and as a plug-in for Unreal Engine. Highly optimized to take advantage of the processing power today’s modern multithreaded CPUs like AMD Ryzeseries processors, FEMFX enables developers to add a whole new level of physics realism to their games.

This Unreal Fest Europe 2019 presentation by AMD's Eric Larsen covers the integration of an FEM-based physics system into an Unreal Engine plugin. It introduces the FEM physics method, then cover aspects of integration including: adding a custom vertex shader to support FEM deformation and fracture; developing a custom importer; developing Blueprint interfaces to support sound and special effects. In additon, a demo with a variety of game objects that can be deformed and fractured interactively is shown. 

New AMD FidelityFX Effects

In 2019 AMD released our first AMD FidelityFX feature, Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS). This effect is now used in over 15 games to enable better visual sharpness with minimal artifacts, restoring detail lost after Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) is applied. Now we are expanding FidelityFX into an open-source image quality developer toolkit with four additional shader-based features aimed at improving rendering quality and performance.

• FidelityFX Screen Space Reflections: Our implementation of Stochastic Screen Space Reflections (SSSR) delivers high-quality reflections with minimal overhead, via an optimized compute shader and RDNA architecture-optimized denoising.
• FidelityFX Ambient Occlusion: Our RDNA architecture-optimized Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion (CACAO) effect dynamically and efficiently helps improve the appearance of objects based their exposure to ambient light.
• FidelityFX HDR Mapper: Optimized for use with AMD FreeSynPremium Pro displays, AMD’s Luminance Preserving Mapper (LPM) delivers superior HDR and wide color gamut content for games.
• FidelityFX Downsampler: Single-pass and optimized for RDNA architecture, AMD’s compute shader-based Single Pass Downsampler (SPD) generates texture MIP levels using asynchronous compute for optimal performance.