AMD Render Pipeline Shaders SDK adds Linux support

One for game developers here and anyone tinkering around with graphics APIs, as AMD has announced the next upgrade to their Render Pipeline Shaders SDK and now it has Linux support.

This SDK was announced back in December in Open Beta, as a comprehensive and extensible Render Graph framework for graphics applications and engines using explicit APIs (like Vulkan and DirectX 12). The v1.1 update from May 3rd adds in:

• Linux support for the base library and the RPSL compiler.
• Support for dynamically loading Vulkan functions.
• Support for latest stable Agility SDK 1.608.3.
• Automatic marking of the discard flags to accesses.

Some background on it from GitHub:

"The AMD Render Pipeline Shaders (RPS) SDK is a comprehensive and extensible Render Graph framework.

Since the debut of explicit graphics APIs (Direct3D 12 and Vulkan®), Render Graphs (or Frame Graphs) have been proposed as an elegant and efficient solution to various problems such as generating resource barriers, managing transient memory and scheduling GPU workload. In practice, it is non-trivial to implement a render graph system from scratch, and it requires effort to keep it optimal according to hardware, API and content changes. Porting effects and techniques between different render graph systems may also consume extra engineering time.

The RPS SDK intends to make Render Graphs more easily accessible and to provide a generally optimal barrier generator and (aliasing) memory scheduler. RPS also tries to simplify Render Graph construction by extending HLSL with attributes and intrinsics to create a domain specific language for render graph programming. This enables opt-in applications to program Render Graphs implicitly via a high-level, declarative programming model, allowing users to focus on the render pipeline logic rather than node configuration details. We call the extended language "Render Pipeline Shader Language", or RPSL."

Always good to see more and more developer-focused tooling available for Linux, bringing down more barriers for developers working on games, game engines, drivers and more.