Thursday, March 20th 2014
AMD Demonstrates Full Support for DirectX 12 at Game Developer Conference
Today, AMD announced support for Microsoft and its revamped graphics application programming interface, DirectX 12, a new "console-like" version of the graphics API that has inspired PC gaming for nearly two decades. During the Microsoft-sponsored panel, DirectX: Evolving Microsoft's Graphics Platform, AMD revealed that it will support DirectX 12 on all AMD Radeon GPUs that feature the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.
AMD will support and collaborate with Microsoft on the development of the generational advancement of the API, to continue to improve the experience for both developers and end users.
"AMD strongly believes in the benefits gamers and game developers can realize from lower-overhead API development," said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, Graphics Business Unit, AMD. "With the Mantle API, AMD has shown the world our commitment to incredible performance, and we look forward to enabling the same performance gains by supporting the industry-standard DirectX 12."
DirectX 12 will offer tantalizing opportunities for game developers to extract new performance from PC graphics cards with a newly-streamlined language that reduces API overhead. DirectX 12 will be the first generational leap for the platform since DirectX 11 made its debut in 2008.
"AMD has always been an essential partner in the development of DirectX," said Anuj Gosalia, Development Manager, Windows Graphics, Microsoft. "As we start the next chapter for our historic API, we look forward to continued great collaboration with AMD to bring gamers the best possible performance on AMD hardware."
A DirectX 12 support schedule for AMD Radeon GPUs will be published at a later date.
AMD will support and collaborate with Microsoft on the development of the generational advancement of the API, to continue to improve the experience for both developers and end users.
DirectX 12 will offer tantalizing opportunities for game developers to extract new performance from PC graphics cards with a newly-streamlined language that reduces API overhead. DirectX 12 will be the first generational leap for the platform since DirectX 11 made its debut in 2008.
"AMD has always been an essential partner in the development of DirectX," said Anuj Gosalia, Development Manager, Windows Graphics, Microsoft. "As we start the next chapter for our historic API, we look forward to continued great collaboration with AMD to bring gamers the best possible performance on AMD hardware."
A DirectX 12 support schedule for AMD Radeon GPUs will be published at a later date.
54 Comments on AMD Demonstrates Full Support for DirectX 12 at Game Developer Conference
From Techreport. techreport.com/news/26210/directx-12-will-also-add-new-features-for-next-gen-gpus
"However, Tamasi explained that DirectX 12 will introduce a set of new features in addition to the lower-level abstraction, and those features will require new hardware."
Mr Tamasi is from NVIDIA and doesn't have the authority for non-NVIDIA hardware.
Techreport's "new blend modes" and something called "conservative rasterization" refers to DirectX12's new rendering modes.
1. "Programmable blend and efficient OIT with pixel ordered UAV".
2. "Better collision and culling with Conservative Rasterization".
If you compare point 1 with software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/07/18/order-independent-transparency-approximation-with-pixel-synchronization
The API is based on Intel's Pixel Sync. The main feature with this Intel API is the pixel shader wait function. This avoids the "link list" requirements since the pipelines are handling the pixel shader read/manage/write order.
Again, NVIDIA's Mr Tamasi DOES NOT have any authority for non-NVIDIA hardware.
For reference
DirectX11's Link List based OIT from www.docstoc.com/docs/106125562/Order-Independent-Transparency-Using-DirectX-11-Linked-Lists
OpenGL 4.0+'s Link List based OIT from blog.icare3d.org/2010/07/opengl-40-abuffer-v20-linked-lists-of.html
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From www.amd.com/us/press-releases/Pages/amd-demonstrates-2014mar20.aspx
"Full DirectX 12 compatibility promised for the award-winning Graphics Core Next architecture"
AMD claims "FULL DirectX 12 compatibility".
Now I will be repeating and extending some of what rvalencia has already said below. Since it appears some of you have absolutely terrible reading comprehension, maybe a few different formats of the same information will finally make the facts about dx12 sink in. Funny how people that actually have some idea of the subjects they talk about tend to draw the same conclusions, isn't it?
So yeah, NVidia's fancy 'better than mantle' driver? Complete nonsense, they are using a worst case scenario for mantle (no cpu bottleneck), using FALSE metrics for both dx and mantle for the AMD hardware metrics (do your own research, kids) and also not achieving comparable minimums by their *own* admission. Of course, they haven't included the most relevant metric (minimum fps) in their chart, they only verbally mentioned their failure to compete and their plans to 'whittle away at it'. Yeah, right. They gained less than 5 fps, a smaller gain than most dx titles see with driver-specific optimization and they couldn't even solve the stalls so commonly found with dx, even with just this *one* title.
Let's see crossfire mantle vs. sli dx 'magic driver' on that same hexacore testbed, novidia. Pretending that minimum fps isn't the most important metric is laughably transparent.
Again, NVidia will NOT be providing full dx12 support with kepler or anything before it. The fact that any of you believe what NVidia says when it comes to dx specifications (or any other API for that matter) is hilarious.
How quickly you forget NVidia 'dx 11.1* support'.
Have fun buying new hardware and also waiting until 2016 for *virtualized* 'unified memory'. Hilarious.
Little kids with zero education in semiconductors really have no business calling Charlie Demerjian 'chuckles'.
And since mantle/DX12 is mainly about multi-core CPU optimization, nvidia couldn't care less, since they just do not make any.
For same reason they still use unoptimized physX 2.8.x in ALL of their supported games.
But though nvidia always talking funny bullshit, they have brilliant marketing dept. for that, the most ridiculous in that INTEL "happily" supported DX12 too.
Intel, since it is literally the monopoly on PC market, is the last one who needs anything removing CPU overhead.
Because then AMD CPUs equal intel's from gaming performance point.
There is actual reason why intel make 4core CPUs for 7 years now, although they know the only way to keep performance gain is bring more CPU cores on.
But it is always nice to hear how many years they have been hardly working on that, wonder how long microsoft worked on low level API for their console. It is fucked up all those companies care about profit and they take PC platform for granted :/