Product: AMD Unveils ATI Game Development Tools

Officials from integrated circuit manufacturer AMD have released information surrounding the firm's latest development tools, namely GPU PerfStudio and GPU ShaderAnalyzer, both of which are designed to make graphics development easier and more productive. According to AMD officials, these developer tools allow for rapid bottleneck detection, advanced rendering techniques and interactive tuning of shaders, resulting in real-time performance improvements and greater shader accuracy. Among those companies currently utilizing AMD's suite of tools are Croatia‘s Croteam (Serious Sam) and British developer The Creative Assembly (Total War), as well as Juice Games and Codemasters. Specifically, AMD's GPU PerfStudio, which is currently in beta with version 1.0, offers developers a real-time performance analysis tool designed to help tune the graphics performance of a D3D9 application. In addition, officials note that GPU PerfStudio increases performance with an override of key rendering states in real-time for rapid bottleneck detection, creating real-time performance charts. The other new addition the AMD lineup of tools, GPU Shader Analyzer, is a tool for analyzing the performance of pixel and vertex shaders on ATI graphics cards. The software is designed to offer developers “accurate performance estimates” of shaders, and even offers the ability to view disassembly of generated hardware shaders. Officials further note that the GPU Shader Analyzer, which supports Direct3D 1.1 - 3.0 pixel and vertex shaders, can be used as a GUI tool for interactive tuning of shaders or in command line mode to generate detailed reports. Finally, another notable instrument available for game designers from ATI is HLSL2GLSL, which is a downloadable open-source tool that directly translates shader source from HLSL to GLSL. AMD adds that the company also offers a convenient library version with full source code as well.