AMD Radeon GFX & DirectX 12

[ginjaninja]

Lets just pretend for a second that DX12 delivers on all of it's promises.

Your forgetting one important thing. Game design is going to change. With the increased draw calls (or whatever DX12 is bringing to the table) game design is going to get more complex and demanding, meaning it's going to be business as usual.

Your still going to need to buy powerful GPU's to driver performance in these ever demanding games.

understood that multiadapter in dx12 is an advantage, but is there anything special about an 'apu' in this regard? or is an intel gpu just a good (relative to their inherent performance in any case)

 

[humbug]

understood that multiadapter in dx12 is an advantage, but is there anything special about an 'apu' in this regard? or is an intel gpu just a good (relative to their inherent performance in any case)

An APU, coined by AMD; is a chip with parallel (GPU) and serial (CPU) compute cores on the same die.

Technically Intel's Core i series CPU's are APU's by AMD's definition, although Intel's 'APU' is not as advanced in that regard, not as integrated, its not a 'Heterogeneous System Architecture' (HSA) it can't combine serial and parallel workloads in the same memory pool, so it can't accelerate compatible apps

The benefits of HSA as you can see here are massive performance gains.

Spoiler

From an APU perspective, As it stands right now retail Intel have the faster CPU parts while AMD have the faster GPU parts.

 

[Orangey]

Nothing will change re: VRAM pooling or iGPU hybrid mGPU.

They are pie in the sky ideas for a slide deck and nothing more.

 

[GoogalyMoogaly]

Do we know if Vulkan offers the same functionality around things like VRAM pooling?

If it does, great, but if it doesn't and Vulkan is actually adopted then we may not see these things fully utilised.

Also, the big factor here is that consoles aren't going to change (that much) so will still be the limiting factor. Developers aren't going to suddenly start rewriting games for PC release so we'll get the same ports we get at the minute.

 

[Noctifer]

Do we know if Vulkan offers the same functionality around things like VRAM pooling?

If it does, great, but if it doesn't and Vulkan is actually adopted then we may not see these things fully utilised.

Also, the big factor here is that consoles aren't going to change (that much) so will still be the limiting factor. Developers aren't going to suddenly start rewriting games for PC release so we'll get the same ports we get at the minute.

The Vulkan specification isn't yet finished, but I would guess that it's going to have the same features just as Mantle and DirectX 12 do.

Most graphics features that games have are not game specific but are all done in the engine. So we don't actually need game devs to implement all those features in all the games, just in the engines that those games are build on. So if Unity 5 supports the multi-adapter functionality it would work on every game that is build in Unity 5. But that's assuming the engine supports it, some devs take an engine and modify it, like Thief which is a UE3 game that had Mantle support added to it despite UE3 not supporting Mantle.

 

[Orangey]

The console SDKs & APIs already allow for low-level techniques.

If you recall the 360 had a tuned version of DX9 that could mimic some DX10 features. The new ones are the same. Vulkan is Mantle which allowed pooling so answer to first thing is yes.

 

[Dygaza]

Gonna be a lot of people who start moaning that their overclocks have become unstable after you start using igpu aswell. All that extra heat

 

[Orangey]

On a semi-related note Intel's TDP just shot up 30W.