Oxide Games, a small studio founded by former Civilization developers, has released a video showcasing its 64-bit Nitrous game engine - and it's worth a watch.
Ashes of the Singularity developer, Oxide Games, will be discussing their Object Space Lighting technique within DX12, during the GDC 2016.
Well, here is some good news for NVIDIA users. It appears that NVIDIA will fully implement Async Compute via an upcoming driver.
Emulated perhaps, via CPU? I dont know, I dont understand this stuff!! lol
It was only a matter of time either way, and it's time Nvidia can easily afford.
I hadn't taken the time to read a lot of technical info on why Nvidia cards had trouble with this. But I had assumed it should be able to be added via driver. The hardware itself is pretty straight forward, I wasn't aware of anything that should have limited it from doing async.
At this point, it's a software/hardware combo solution for NVIDIA's cards (unlike pure hardware solution for AMD's GCN cards)
I don't fully agree but again I'm no expert in the matter. How I see it though is just like how it works with other components I.e. Memory, cpu etc... It has to be hardware designed so the power runs through the circuitry in parallel. That's how the components are designed in parallel pipelines then how can they run in parallel?
This adding it by a driver update doesn't make sense to me at all. Unless it was already built that way but was purposefully disabled until the point were they could sell it as an extra feature & just enable it in future & they've been caught short. What they're talking about would surly consist of a complete driver rebuild from the ground up from scratch.
Either way, the fact that it's software based means Nvidia controls exactly how much power they allow to their customer depending on which card they buy. Then lower it again in time for a release of a new card with benchmarks that show huge improvements rather than what it actually should of been.
All cards need software i.e. drivers to say how the hardware works and what features are present and available. Not sure why everyone is saying NVidia is just emulating async, can someone explain this fully?
They explain at the end of the article, Maxwell 2 will use a mix of hardware and software whereas GCN uses hardware:
"Maxwell 2: Queues in Software, work distributor in software (context switching), Asynchronous Warps in hardware, DMA Engines in hardware, CUDA cores in hardware.
GCN: Queues/Work distributor/Asynchronous Compute engines (ACEs/Graphic Command Processor) in hardware, Copy (DMA Engines) in hardware, CUs in hardware.”
Yea it's definitely not proper Async, I have a feeling it's not going to work too well in comparison with AMDs GCN native hardware support, can't see emulation matching the real thing.
No one seems to understand that Nvidia just does Async Compute differently from AMD. Hardware support is there, software support isn't up to scratch yet, that's the only async compute "problem" Nvidia users are having right now.
Speaking on the hardware enthusiast forums, Overclock.net, a developer from Oxide Games had some interesting information to share regarding the utilization of Async Compute in modern games. The studio happens to be the first to produce a game that supports DirectX 12 from the ground up.
That's why XB1 is catching up graphically. Features like async. compute were in PS4 day one, while it was only enabled recently on XB1. DX12 is available to devs now too, but no game is using a native DX12 designed engine yet. Matter of fact, Fable Legends is the only game right now that even uses it at all and it was patched.
I wonder how Oxide's engine will look on XB1?
A-sync compute has been used in very few PS4 games so far. 3 as of a couple of months ago, according to AMD.
When it becomes more widespread the PS4's advantage can only grow, as it has 8 ACEs and the Xbox One has 2.
Infamous Second Son uses asnyc compute on the PS4 for example. The Xbox One will improve a lot with DX12, there a more features coming, like deferred context.
You guys do realize that PS4 has 4 TIMES more ASYNC compute than Xbox One...
For devs, this is untapped power on PS4.
I love this some secret sauce and catching up nonsense. X1 has very very small ACE...
If this is true, this is a massive boost for PS4 given how it has 8 ACE(xbox only has 2). This will widen the gap.
Edit
Btw, Cerny did bring up that late in PS4 lifecycle Async and GPGPU will be used.
Not only that, but it was built with the GPU, separate co-processors, and 4 move engines( DMA) all working at once with no hindering performance. DX12 will unlock this aswell.. (Multi vendor GPU set up)
@Volkama Or maybe Microsoft found that they only needed 2. It is in DX12 after all and Microsoft created DirectX :)
@Sam it is possible that 2 was the right choice for balanced performance on the Xbox One, and any additional spend would have been better elsewhere. It is possible Sony misjudged the value of ACEs, and their 8 will be somewhat wasted.
What isn't possible is that both systems using async compute will be a disadvantage for the PS4.
It's exciting for both consoles though, should lead to some tasty physics and particle effects if we're lucky.
•PS4 has 8 ACEs vs XB1 with only 2.
•XB1 has 4 command processors vs PS4 with only 1.
•While PS4's ACEs are stuck waiting for commands, MS will keep theirs happily fed.
Who Cares? Seriously, PS4 has many bottlenecks that will show MORE as the system ages. XB1 hasn't even gotten to use a proper API yet. Async is only one of many features PS4's API has that XB1 didn't at launch but I was staying on topic.
@sync
You realize that's what catching up means? They are closing the fidelity gap, so who's delusional?
@apex
You seem to know a lot about secret sauce. Are you a closet Mr. X reader?
"•XB1 has 4 command processors vs PS4 with only 1. "
Lol what? No it doesnt.
PS4 has 12 cores processing commands. Xbox One has 8 cores.
Some x1 fans are truly desperate.
That is what MGS 5 is also using and it looks incredible! Enjoying the game so far!
When it comes to gaming, I couldn't care less about fancy tech words and dx12 mumbo jumbo. Make a good game and I will play it. I might like it, I might not.
I smell potential