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Report: DirectX 12 can aggregate GeForce and Radeon GPU power

by Mark Tyson on 25 February 2015, 10:50

Tags: Windows 10, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), AMD (NYSE:AMD), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA)

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Surprising new details regarding how Microsoft's new DirectX 12 API will work and the impactful implications for PC users and builders have been uncovered by Tom's Hardware US. Firstly it is thought that the new API will implement Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU capabilities. Secondly these graphics resources may work between rival the GPU products from AMD, Nvidia and Intel. So you could have a PC with an AMD APU and discrete Nvidia GPU for example, and both GPU components would be pooled together to be used by DirectX 12 to power your gaming.

The source said that thanks to DirectX 12's Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU capabilities all the different graphics resources in your PC system will be put in one 'bucket' to be made use of by the system. Your PC would not require mirrored resources for this trick to work like in current SLI and CrossFire setups.

Tom's Hardware explained that Split Frame Rendering (SFR) would be used as follows; "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". DirectX 12 is said to tie together the entire graphics subsystem in SFR duties and will reduce latency and increase framerates because of this.

Red and Green come together in peace and harmony

Interestingly the aggregated graphics resources will be brand agnostic, says the new report. If true this could lead to some PC enthusiasts building PC setups that incorporate a choice of graphics cards split between examples from AMD and Nvidia. Why would you put together such a machine? Because it may be possible to make the most of both firm's proprietary frills such as GeForce Experience features, AMD TrueAudio and AMD FreeSync - among other technologies - in a single system.

Many laptop owners already have a system that could benefit from the above, if for example, an Intel Core system with either a discrete AMD or Nvidia graphics solution can pool its resources with the integrated Intel graphics. I own such a switchable graphics system (Intel Core CPU plus AMD Radeon graphics) and it would be good to be able to combine the GPU power to make full use of this laptop's resources in some demanding games.

Microsoft is reportedly making DirectX 12 friendly for developers so that they can implement the above mentioned powerful features in their games without prohibitive effort. Tom's Hardware reports that we will hear a lot more about the above technologies and SFR implementation, at GDC next week. DirectX 12 will arrive alongside Windows 10 later in the year.



HEXUS Forums :: 12 Comments

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hexus
If true this could lead to some PC enthusiasts building PC setups that incorporate a choice of graphics cards split between examples from AMD and Nvidia.
Only if the GPU drivers are agnostic and play nicely together, which they aren't and won't.
kalniel
hexus
If true this could lead to some PC enthusiasts building PC setups that incorporate a choice of graphics cards split between examples from AMD and Nvidia.
Only if the GPU drivers are agnostic and play nicely together, which they aren't and won't.

hahahaha, i was going to write, Nvidia will disable all of its features in a driver if an AMD card found same way they did with physx, so it will never work from business standpoint.

However, according to Multi-GPU from different brands, Lucid Virtu MVP did that on top of DX11 but unfortunately it was not widely adopted by people, but now since its embedded inside DX12 then we can assume that this is finally going to be adopted by everyone.
Like Lucid's solution, this will be to help Intel integrated chips work with a discrete GPU. Not having discrete AMD and nVidia cards in the same system as the article suggests.
I suppose it could be a bit of free power if your Intel CPU had its graphics running alongside the graphics card. Would allow for some of those special effects on GRID games only available to intel graphics.
I wanted to try Lucid Virtu MVP but was put off by the possibility of having to pay additional charges to get it and then not knowing what sort of results to expect, that and the issue with Lucid not support multi GPU installations, which would have created problems for me at the time as one PC had a 6990 and the other had 2x GTX580 cards.