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To NVIDIA and AMD, Microsoft's DirectX 12 says, "Let's work together"

By Wong Chung Wee - on 26 Feb 2015, 11:13am

To NVIDIA and AMD, Microsoft's DirectX 12 says, "Let's work together"

(Image source: Microsoft)

According to Tom’s Hardware, Microsoft’s DirectX 12 will enable AMD GPUs to work alongside NVIDIA GPUs in multi-graphics cards setups. This is courtesy of DirectX 12’s Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU feature. Due to its ability to make low-level hardware abstraction, DirectX 12 allows game developers to “work closer to the metal”. Coupled with the Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU feature, the API is able to combine graphics compute resources into a “single bucket”, regardless of its hardware manufacturer origin.

The game developer has autonomy to delegate the graphics compute tasks to different GPUs. In addition, DirectX 12 will debut a new frame rendering technique, the Split Frame Rendering (SFR), which will allegedly allow the texture and geometry data to be divided between GPUs. The GPUs will be able to render a single frame collectively as each GPU will work on a specific portion of the frame, and the total number of constituent frame portion being equal to the number of installed GPUs. Being able to render a single frame all at once, the queue depth is “always just one” (or less), this will allow for higher frame rates.

In short, DirectX 12 is able to combine multiple GPUs into a single, logical GPU, with a seemingly agnostic view of its hardware origins. In fact, the new DirectX 12 is touted to work with graphics chips from AMD, NVIDIA, Intel and QualComm. This new development might even spell the end of proprietary multi-GPU technologies of AMD CrossFire and NVIDIA SLI. For the end consumer, we will have to wait with bated breath to see how best game developers wield the DirectX 12 API to make disparate GPUs work in harmony.

(Source: Tom’s Hardware, WCCFtech)

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