Tuesday, January 23rd 2018
AMD Cancels Implicit Primitive Shader Driver Support
Primitive shaders are lightweight shaders that break the separation of vertex and geometry shaders, promising a performance gain in supporting games. Initially announced during the Radeon RX Vega launch, the feature has been delayed again and again. At one of its 2018 International CES interactions with the press, AMD reportedly announced that it had cancelled the implicit driver path for primitive shaders. Game developers will still be able to implement primitive shaders on AMD hardware, using a (yet to be released) explicit API path. The implicit driver path was the more interesting technology though, since it could have provided meaningful performance gains to existing games and help cut down a lot of developer effort for games in development. AMD didn't state the reasons behind the move.
To explain the delay, some people were speculating that the Primitive Shader feature was broken unfixable in hardware, which doesn't seem to be the case, now that we are hearing about upcoming API support for it, so this can also be interpreted as good news for Vega owners.
Source:
Y33H@ (Golem's Marc Sauter) on 3DCenter.org Forums
To explain the delay, some people were speculating that the Primitive Shader feature was broken unfixable in hardware, which doesn't seem to be the case, now that we are hearing about upcoming API support for it, so this can also be interpreted as good news for Vega owners.
39 Comments on AMD Cancels Implicit Primitive Shader Driver Support
This can't possibly get any more cringey or unnecessarily pompous.
But as this article points out - the good news is it is still being implemented on plenty of games anyways. And when it is implemented, Vega 64 is indeed as strong as the Titan Xp...
But it seems that AMD saw it requires a huge amount of work from their side, so they just forgot about their promise and dropped it in the hands of developers.
Cane-in-point:Only the most dedicated AMD fans are remotely surprised by this. Everybody was pointing out AMD's hot air machine back when VEGA came out.And given how amazing DX12 mGPU support has been, I'm sure we will see this feature is all 1 games that bother to support it.
digiworthy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Wolfenstein-2-benchmarks_1440pR.png
Instead, you resort to benchmarks from a single game, running on an engine that is known to favor AMD hardware. Cherry picking benchmarks is a long overplayed, predictable tactic.
On average, vega 64 is about equal to a 1080, a chip that was both cheaper and more power efficient. Vega 56 was at least performance competitive with the 1070. Both came out far too late for AMD, and nobody believed that these chips would ever challenge more powerful chips, no matter how many driver shenanigans that AMD pulls.
gamegpu.com/action-/-fps-/-tps/wolfenstein-ii-the-new-colossus-2017-test-gpu-cpu