DirectX 12 med support for nVidia og AMD samtidigt

DirectX 12 tilbyder nye multi GPU muligheder!

I den seneste uge har der været megen virak og omtale omkring DirectX 12, og hvad det vil betyde for mening mand. Der er stadig mange gisninger, men ikke desto mindre lader det til, at nogen reelt har mulighed for at blive til noget. Ikke blot med at DirectX 12 tilbyder, nogle nye grafiske finesser som vi kender fra diverse opdateringer igennem årerne, men nu ser det ud til at der faktisk sker noget på hardware planet som hidtil har været uhørt. De mest spændende forudsigelser er:

1) Krydskompabilitet mellem nVidia og AMD GPU'er i en multi-GPU konfiguration.
2) Der bliver gjort op med at f.eks nu bliver  3x 4GB Vram = 12GB Vram ! Hvad der ikke har været muligt i over eet årti kan Direct X12 måske endelige gøre op med således      at Vram nu faktisk lægges sammen og ikke blot bruges til at lagre teksturer parallelt.

"One of the big things that we will be seeing is DirectX 12's Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU capabilities. What this means is that the API combines all the different graphics resources in a system and puts them all into one "bucket." It is then left to the game developer to divide the workload up however they see fit, letting different hardware take care of different tasks.

DirectX 12 will remove the 4 + 4 = 4 idea and will work with a new frame rendering method called SFR, which stands for Split Frame Rendering. Developers will be able to manually, or automatically, divide the texture and geometry data between the GPUs, and all of the GPUs can then work together to work on each frame. Each GPU will then work on a specific portion of the screen, with the number of portions being equivalent to the number of GPUs installed.

....

What we're seeing here is that DirectX 12 is capable of aggregating graphics resources, be that compute or memory, in the most efficient way possible. Don't forget, however, that this isn't only beneficial for systems with multiple discrete desktop GPUs. Laptopswith dual-graphics solutions, or systems running an APU and a GPU will be able to benefit too. DirectX 12's aggregation will allow GPUs to work together that today would be completely mismatched, possibly making technologies like SLI and CrossFire obsolete in the future.

There is a catch, however. Lots of the optimization work for the spreading of workloads is left to the developers – the game studios. The same went for older APIs, though, and DirectX 12 is intended to be much friendlier. For advanced uses it may be a bit tricky, but according to the source, implementing the SFR should be a relatively simple and painless process for most developers."

Det lyder alt sammen super spændende og lovende. Vi håber, at spiludviklerne vil tage de nye muligheder til sig med åbne arme således at fremtiden bliver præget af større fleksibilitet og åbenhed på GPU markedet.
Som en notits til sidst skal vi lige bemærke at DirectX 12 kun kommer til at blive understøttet i Windows 10 (såvidt der indtil videre er blevet tilkendegivet).

Kilde: Toms