AMD GPU Services 5.2.0

The AMD GPU Services (AGS) library provides game and application developers with the ability to query information about installed AMD GPUs and their driver, in order to access useful information that isn’t normally available through standard operating system or graphics APIs. AGS is also the gateway to some of the very useful extra functionality provided by AMD GPUs, especially for games and apps running on Windows®.

We recently released AGS 5.2.0 and its associated documentation, adding some commonly requested functionality and fixing some bugs (of course!).

The major functionality is the addition of app registration for DirectX® 12. App registration lets you give more information about your game or application to our driver, which can then use that (ideally unique) information to better support the game or app if we need to make driver-side changes to help things run as efficiently and correctly as possible.

We also changed how you get access to extensions under DX12, requiring you to create your GPU device using agsDriverExtensionsDX12_CreateDevice() , instead of the normal D3D12CreateDevice() call you’d make to D3D.

Lastly, we’ve also added support for breadcrumb markers in D3D11. Using the agsDriverExtensionsDX11_WriteBreadcrumb() API, you can put in place a strategy for debugging driver issues more easily. Sometimes your game or app can interact with the driver in a way that causes it to crash or TDR. The new API gives you the ability to leave markers around your D3D11 API calls, helping you narrow down exactly what interaction with the driver caused the problem.

That ability is very powerful, helping you to help us either fix the driver issue, or help you find a way to work around it in your game or app.

Download and Documentation

You can download the latest 5.2.0 release on GitHub and check out the product page on GPUOpen. We also updated the documentation to reflect the 5.2.0 changes.