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Vulkan will officially support multi-GPUs in Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Linux

Wrinkly

Wrinkly

Wrinkly

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From Dark Side Of Gaming - http://www.dsogaming.com/news/vulka...0-windows-7-windows-8-1-and-linux/#more-97089

Last week, we informed you about Vulkan support multiple GPUs only in Windows 10. Well, it appears that won’t be the case as the Khronos Group has announced that Vulkan will also support multi-GPUs in Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 (as well as in Linux).

As the Khronos Group claimed:

“The good news is that the Vulkan multi-GPU specification is very definitely NOT tied to Windows 10. It is possible to implement the Vulkan multi-GPU extension on any desktop OS including Windows 7, 8.X and 10 and Linux.”

The Khronos Group has also commented on its GDC 2017 slides that, obviously, mislead us.

“Some of the Khronos GDC presentations mentioned that for Vulkan multi-GPU functionality, Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) must be in Linked Display Adapter (LDA) mode. That was not a very clear statement that has caused some confusion. And so it is worth clarifying that:

  1. The use of WDDM is referring to the use of Vulkan multi-GPU functionality on Windows. On other OS, WDDM is not necessary to implement the Vulkan multi-GPU extension.
  2. On Windows, the use of LDA mode can make implementing Vulkan multi-GPU functionality easier, and will probably be used by most implementations, but it is not strictly necessary.
  3. If an implementation on Windows does decide to use LDA mode, it is NOT tied to Windows 10. LDA mode has been available on many versions of Windows, including Windows 7 and 8.X.”
The bottom line is that Vulkan will support multiple GPUs in pretty much all operating systems!
Click to expand...
 
I'm hoping we see this used in far more games, whilst it isn't the answer to everything, having the option is nice and for those who use mGPU setups it should be an improvement over DX.
 
I doubt anything will change. Developing mGPU is very hard, especially with modern game engine designs and rendering techniques. A lotcould be done with significant developer effort, but then multiGPU is such a small market its not really worth their time.

What we might see a little more of is secondary GPUS (inducing IGPU) being used for some additional compute tasks.
 
Support for MGPU does require more talanted developers but what we see more and more is the use of 'off the shelf' libraries if not complete game engines. Updating support within these vastly reduces the work / talent required back to normal levels.
 
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