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A few months back an intriguing rumour cropped up regarding DirectX 12 making use of the shared performance of both discrete and integrated GPUs, and following Square Enix’s Build 2015 Witch - Chapter 0 [cry] demo it’s emerged this technology is very much real
Known as DirectX 12 Multi-Adapter Rendering, the latest technology is designed to capitalise on every piece of graphics hardware sitting inside a PC. Most of today’s central processing units come equipped with integrated graphics, iGPUs which lay dormant once beefier dedicated hardware is installed. With Multi-Adapter Rendering the two GPUs will work in conjunction, providing a small but significant performance boost.
While not an exact science, take the GeForce GTX 970 as an example. This typically has around 5,000 GFLOPS floating-point performance, while a high-end Intel Iris Integrated Graphics 6100 comes packing 850 GLOPS of its own, a 17% bump in theoretical raw power. We’re seeing integrated graphics make huge leaps right now, so this could be a vital avenue for additional power further down the line.
In theory the DirectX 12 Multi-Adapter Renderer will allow a specialised link between all GPUs in a system, provided they are DirectX 12 compatible. Demonstrations were ran using a GeForce GTX Titan X alongside an Intel iGPU, with both racing towards rendering 635 frames. The solo Titan X averaged 35.9 fps and took 17.68s to render, while the Titan X with Intel iGPU averaged 39.7 fps and took just 15.98s, a boost of 10% in the performance of Nvidia’s flagship card.
We’d certainly like to hear a bit more about this technology, but as it stands it appears as if VRAM of graphics cards will be combined and utilised to its full extent, as well as the possibility of SLI or CrossFire configurations using different GPUs. There’s no confirmation on the previous rumour of interchanging AMD and Nvidia graphics cards, although this is likely to be down to the whims of individual game developers.
It’s certainly an interesting development to keep an eye out for, and it ensures practically all PC gamers will be seeing a not-inconsiderable bump in graphics performance when they upgrade to Windows 10 - with DX12 support included of course.
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