AMD brings Vista into Stream SDK

Complete with HD 4800 Radeon support

AMD HAS released a new version of its Stream Software Development Kit (SDK), allowing developers to write general-purpose apps, which will now be able to run on Radeon and ATI Catalyst graphics processors.

ATI says firms are realising that significant performance gains are to be had for certain types of applications on a GPU's parallel processing architecture.

SDK 1.2 gives developers some fairly important new features to play with.

As well as providing broader support for key software and hardware standards which coders rely on, the SDK 1.2 also purportedly supports Vista (32-bit and 64-bit) as well as DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 interoperability. AMD has made it clear it aims for eventual "balanced adoption and support" of both DirectX 11 and OpenCL application programming interfaces, planned as "a series of upgrades" within the next 18 months.

Supporting both ATI’s Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 graphics processors across multiple operating systems, as well as ATI Catalyst 8.8 Display Driver, the SDK 1.2 also comes with a new unified user’s guide, improved sample browser format and documents and performance enhancements to Brook+.

AMD reckons Stream Computing is going to provide the ability to process very, very large amounts of information in much less time than traditional methods, precisely because it takes advantage of the GPU’s parallel processing power.

An AMD spokesman noted that apps created on open Stream SDK could “take advantage of the massive floating point compute capabilities of AMD GPUs to run at dramatically high levels of speed and energy efficiency”.

Download the new SDK in Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Linux here.