NVIDIA this week announced Maxwell, our 10th generation GPU architecture. Maxwell delivers unmatched performance, twice the energy efficiency of the previous generation, and major new graphics capabilities including the latest DirectX 12 (DX12) advancements.
A yawning ogre from the DX12 techdemo based on the Fable Legends title announced at E3. The demo was running on the combination of Maxwell, Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) and DX12. Engineers and artists from Lionhead, Epic, Microsoft and NVIDIA combined talents and hard work to create a compelling technology demo of Fable running on a DX12-based version of UE4. The creation of the demo wrung out bugs and extracted performance gains from drivers, runtime, engine and application alike.
DirectX 12 – Range, Control and Efficiency Spanning devices ranging from PCs to consoles, tablets and smartphones, Microsoft’s upcoming DirectX 12 API has been designed to have CPU efficiency significantly greater than earlier DirectX versions. One of the keys to accomplishing this is providing more explicit control over hardware – giving game developers more control of GPU and CPU functions.
While the NVIDIA driver very efficiently manages resource allocation and synchronization under DX11, under DX12 it is the game developer’s responsibility to manage the CPU and GPU. Because the developer has an intimate understanding of their application’s behavior and needs, DX12 has the potential to be much more efficient than DX11 at the cost of some effort on the part of the developer. DX12 contains a number of improvements that can be used to improve the API’s CPU efficiency; we’ve announced that all Fermi, Kepler, and Maxwell GPUs will fully support the DX12 API.
New Functionality – DX12 & DX11 In addition, the DX12 release of DirectX will introduce a number of new features supported by Maxwell for graphics rendering. Microsoft disclosed some of these features at GDC and during NVIDIA’s Editor’s Day conference. Conservative Raster is one of these features. Useful in algorithms from voxelization to memory allocation and occlusion culling, conservative raster tests a primitive against the area of the pixel.
Another is Raster Ordered Views (ROVs), which gives developers control over the ordering of pixel shader operations. ROVs can be used to implement functions such as custom blending as well as algorithms for transparency. The new graphics features included in DX12 will be accessible from either DX11 or DX12, so developers will be free to use the new features with either the DX11 or DX12 APIs.
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