Gadgetory

everybody i'm steve from gamers access net and i'm joined by robert Haluk of AMD we're going to talk about GPU rendering pipeline and DX 12 but before that this coverage is brought to you by cyberpowerpc who make the fan book that we recently overclocked past 4 gigahertz so Robert can you give us a quick run through of the top-level GPU rendering pipeline what's happening on the GPU between the game engine when a scene is being drawn yeah sure so from a really high level the game will ask the graphics card to do something the CPU will pull in that information order it up for the graphics card and send it off to the GPU the GPU will interpret the work as provided by the CPU that's that's what you would call a draw call anytime the CPU asks the GPU to do something and then at the front end of the GPU you have a hardware scheduler which organizes the compute and the graphics and the memory workloads and then sends that through the graphics pipeline where you set up the geometry the texturing the lighting the effects and then you spit it out on the other side and that's raster graphics it comes out in your monitor so we're in the pipeline when you're working with geometry does that get drawn before the shaders are applied or before the effects are applied yeah geometry comes first and then where do the ACPs come in for AMD with the x11 on this case so that's at the front end of the GPU with the hardware schedulers or the aces that's where the GPU decides is this compute work or is this graphics work and then schedules those separately and then with dx12 so do the ACPs benefit DX well for rendering yeah so in directx 12 there's this feature called asynchronous compute where the set up for effects like compute related effects depth of field artificial intelligence GPU physics a lot of camera effects the the setup work for that can be done independently of the geometry work so you can do those at the same time so when the model is finished the geometry is finished the setup work for all the compute stuff is already done so you can jump right into rendering that out and that saves a ton of time what would you say in some of the we spoke to Roy Taylor previously about this at the capsaicin event what would you say is the responsible element for some of em these gains with dx12 and recent benchmarks I think it's two things one is asynchronous compute we're seeing five to thirty percent uplift out of that feature which is just huge but also it's more of a long-term strategy for us mantle was a big piece of that first off winning the console cycle getting all the developers familiar with AMD hardware and how to use our architecture every game developer studio that produces for console has AMD hardware the same kind of hardware that we use on the desktop architectural II and and so we train them on the console then we gave them an API on the desktop that work very similarly and then all the desktop gaming api's now kind of look and work like mantle so when you put all of those pieces together in a chain in a story you see the results in directx 12 people know how to use low-level api's on our hardware they were trained to it where does where does vulcan play into this compared to dx12 programming on the game side is does it have similar gains for AMD how does it work well Vulcans still pretty early it's a you know I've seen developer conjecture that it's like eight months behind directx 12 in terms of development but there is already a game the Talos principle more coming we know that but Vulcan is based on mantle so we took the entire mantle project or the api specification and donated it to Chronos last year so they've built on that to make it multi-vendor multi operating system but at its heart it's still a lot like mental so I closing us out here give us a quick run-through of what you guys have at the booth at pax sure so we're doing a five-on-five League of Legends turn them in and then I believe saturday we're switching to a different game than sunday we're going to do user choice we're showing oculus VR some of our game partners like Banner Saga just all the the good gaming stuff that we're doing right now very cool so that's the AMD booth at PAX East 2016 link in the description below for more information photos things like that thank you for watching we'll see you all next time