AMD posts Smoldr prototype tool
AMD highlighted Smoldr, a tool for DX12 prototyping, signaling continued investment in developer tooling and graphics‑to‑compute workflows. The post suggests AMD is still pushing ecosystem-friendly tooling even as rack and appliance conversations heat up. (x.com)
AMD published a GPUOpen blog post announcing Smoldr on March 17, 2026 and credited Sebastian Neubauer as the author. (gpuopen.com) Smoldr is described as an open‑source command‑line tool that runs DirectX 12 HLSL shaders from plain text scripts by compiling HLSL to DXIL and letting users create pipelines, resources, views, and dispatch compute or ray‑tracing workloads without writing C++. (gpuopen.com) AMD explicitly positions Smoldr as the DirectX counterpart to Google’s Amber (the Vulkan scripting runner), calling it a small scripting tool to simplify DirectX shader prototyping. (gpuopen.com) The GPUOpen article embeds a concrete example script that compiles shaders with dxc, uses a [numthreads(32,1,1)] compute shader, allocates ByteAddressBuffer and RWByteAddressBuffer GPU buffers, dispatches a compute pipeline, and uses EXPECT checks to validate outputs. (gpuopen.com) The project is marked work‑in‑progress, with AMD warning the script syntax may change and directing readers to a GitHub repository where contributions are welcome. (gpuopen.com) Smoldr arrives as an addition to AMD’s GPUOpen toolkit that already hosts prototyping frameworks like Cauldron for DirectX12/Vulkan and analysis tools such as Radeon GPU Analyzer (RGA), which supports DirectX and DXR shader analysis. (github.com)
