Definitely going to be interesting - especially to see the timetable of true next gen performance cards - as at the current rate that could make as much impact as the API differences.
I said this last night, AMD built their hardware with a lot of this tech in mind, they developed their own API Mantle to harness this tech....
Mantle got squashed but we have Vulkan and DX12 from its remains, while people will claim neither are anything like Mantle, i think we can all agree they share the same philosophy as Mantle did.
I am convinced that a lot of what Mantle was has been adpoted into these new API's, if the groundwork was already laid, you wouldnt scrap it and start anew, you would modify and work with what you could from that and remove what you did not need.
Now AMD have built their hardware forward thinking around this stuff, a lot of it probably was developed to harness GCN specifically, but the main advantage right now is AMD have this all in their hardware.
Nvidia kept faith with DX9/10/11 and have streamlined their hardware to focus on maximising this, gambling on DX12, Vulkan, A-Sync etc never really taking off, or at the least being enough years into the future that they could carry on being the DX kings in the present and gear up for the future.
I think they may have been caught flatfooted here with this gamble, as it appears AMD are now reaping the benefits, i think the real key was getting their hardware into consoles, everyone knows the consoles sell more games than anything else, dev budgets for console games are generally much higher than PC games, and with this generation of consoles the architecture is extremely close to PC, so AMD are also reaping these benefits and will continue to do so.
Something made me wonder the other day, Microsoft backed Vulkan... why? they have also promised a 4k 60FPS console based off we believe Polaris.. people were laughing... not so funny now is it? Its odd, but i think Microsoft would probably let devs use Vulkan on their premier console as it would sell games, they can still use DX12 for less fps demanding games, but in games where hitting 60fps @ 4K is going to be the major selling point, Vulkan is probably the clear winnner here, whether DX12 has this potential remains to be seen.
Anyhow it seems Nvidias refined DX drivers and lack of actual real hardware support for tech like A-Sync might bite them a bit going forward, and this latest vulkan thing makes me think Nvidia does not support A-Sync at a hardware level like AMD Does, and that Nvidia are probably more of a software based solution for this, hence the delay getting it running on their cards.
Do you guys honestly believe that Pascal has full support? TotalWar Devs dont know and now ID devs have said no support yet
