DirectX 12 Will Allow Multi-GPU GeForce + Radeon Configs?

DirectX 12 Will Allow Multi-GPU Between GeForce And Radeon Configs?

| Source: tomshardware Author: Mark Campbell

DirectX 12 Will Allow Multi-GPU Between GeForce And Radeon Configs?

Most PC gamers are excited about DX12, the next Generation API from Microsoft, with many rumours indicating that Radeon and Nvidia Multi-GPU Asynchronous configs may be possible.

DirectX 12 is expected to release alongside Windows 10 later this year, finally giving developers "closer to the hardware" access like AMD's Mantle API. Alongside reduced CPU overhead and other improvements to framerates and latency, DX12 may make a big change to how Multi-GPU configurations work.

One change that will be in DirectX12 will be the ability to use multiply/different graphics hardware or resources as a single pool, in which developers can distribute the workload as they please. This will allow different hardware to do different tasks and opens up the potential for GPUs of varying manufacturer to be used at the same time.

One potential new feature of DX12 that will help Multi-GPU configs is that frame buffers, the GPUs VRAM, will not necessarily need to be mirrored, which means that 2 4GB GPUs could act like a 8GB GPU in games. Right now when using Crossfire or SLI the frame buffers of the GPUs must be mirrored. With DX12, provided the developers add/ program the feature, adding more GPUs to your setup could add to your total frame buffer.

DirectX 12 can also support the use of Multiple GPU architectures at one time, meaning that non-matching GPUs could be used together as a single more powerful GPU. This means that there is potential to use your CPUs integrated GPU alongside your dedicated GPU to render the same game, or use Nvidia and AMD GPUs at the same time.

While the prospect of Multi GPU setups using both AMD's and Nvidia's hardware does sound very appealing, in reality I doubt that this will ever happen. I doubt that Nvidia and AMD would be able to put aside their differences to create drivers which would allow these functions.

I remember the days when people could use a hack to get an old Nvidia GPUs to act as a Physx card when using a Radeon GPU as your main GPU, Nvidia has done a lot of work since then to prevent such hacks working as Nvidia understandably want to keep users in their ecosystem.

AMD will likely embrace the possibility of asynchronous crossfire in order to convince users to use both AMD APUs and GPUs in their systems, but right now this is only a guess.

The catch for a lot of these potential features of DX12 is that the developer needs to do the work in order to make it work, which would be a time consuming and expensive exercise. While DX12 will likely increase the amount of developers which will create games with good crossfire and SLI profiles, I doubt many will go as far as to make some of the above possibilities a reality.

One of the biggest changes that is likely to occur when we move to DX12 in terms of Multi-GPU performance is a switch from AFR (alternate frame rendering), where each GPU in a SLI or Crossfire setup renders alternate frames, to SFR (Split Screen Rendering), which is a technique which makes all GPUs create a single frame at the same time, which reduces the latency when delivering frames compared to AFR. Faraxis' Civilization: Beyond Earth, when used with AMD's Mantle API, uses SFR when using multiple GPUs. More information on SFR can be found on Faraxis' website here.

We expect to learn a lot more about DX12 and what it means for us gamers at GDC.

You can join the discussion on DX12's Multi-GPU capabilities on the OC3D Forums.

Radeon + Nvidia Multi-GPU Asynchronous configs may be possible with DX12. http://t.co/cGIbZrP5tf pic.twitter.com/Y2yv5eY4M6 — OC3D (@OC3D) February 25, 2015

Thank you to forum member ander01se for notifying us about this news

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