Graphine CEO: DX 12 'Closer To The Metal', Allows More Optimization For Granite's Tiled Streaming

"Aljosha Demeulemeester expects a performance increased in the tiling back end."

[MCTJim]

I really loved the explanation they gave at their conference. Hopefully the X1 will benefit from this middleware and tiled resources.

[polow got sol]

Game changer (pun intended yes)

[WeAreLegion]

Aljosha Demeulemeester.

How can you look at a name like that and not check for anagrams?

Jeer lame steel madhouse.

[Skate-AK]

Easter, Emulator, Emulate, Mule, Sure, Late, Hate, Dallas. Sure is a lot.

On Topic: Closer to the metal sounds really weird. What's with the buzzwords?

[sourav93]

Well, the phrase "closer to the metal" has been used for a long time now. Usually used when referring to games development for consoles, and recently with AMD's Mantle API. So although it's sort of a "buzzword" or a "buzz-phrase", it's quite well known and gets the point across easily.

[TomahawkX]

DX12 is a beast, I can't wait until games take advantage of it.

[Speak_da_Truth]

Another "talk no action" i'll believe it when i see it.

[Ausbo]

They just announced it. Patience.

[Dumb_username]

A lot of people saw the Cloud live gameplay but they still refused to acknowledge it.

[paranoid1971]

Just like a lot of people saw the "live" Milo video.

[sak500]

It's MS not sony, it'll show sooner rather than never. can't wait for Last guardian for the ps3.

[AnEwGuY]

...and Killing Day, and Eight Days, and The Getaway 3, and WarDevil...

[randomass171]

An announcement is better than no information at all. That's what demonstrations are for. :P

[wheeler01]

Fingers crossed it does what everyone hopes it will. Just a shame we have to wait about 15-17 months to see anything!

As nice as it is to know its coming, it is also pretty rubbish to have to wait so long!

[JCOLE13195]

Devs are being given early access I believe.

[randomass171]

That will certainly give devs an edge. Hopefully they can make games quickly and cheaply.

[Ju]

It won't make the games any better or worse. All it really means is, with DX12 the API to handle tiled resources is easier. It won't make it faster. It'll just easier to work with - because so far it's a nightmare, actually. For people who already use Granite this shouldn't change much. It's how that middleware will be using the system API - which is probably pretty abstracted away within the middleware.

[Illusive_Man]

Weren't some in the Playstation camp raving about Granite and dismissing DX12? Now the CEO of Graphine practically dispels any rumor that there won't be a significant performance boost for the X1, and that DX12 is even closer to the metal than 11.2.

[Ju]

All this DX12 discussion...is useless. This is just a minor API revision with some long overdue multi threading adaptions. It won't make the HW run twice as fast. This is so blown out of proportion it's not even funny.

Otherwise - don't you think if you basically would get that box run twice as fast MS would put all the pressure on it to get it out ASAP to no loose any more ground?

XBO doesn't really need DX12 - it has it's own "low overhead version" anyhow. DX12 is mostly to unify XBO with Windows. Not the otherway round.

[Illusive_Man]

You don't seem very smart. Lets say you have 10 processes to run.

Using 1 thread it takes 10 seconds to run.

If you split the process into 2 threads, now those processes are running concurrently and take 5 seconds.

So the process running in 5 seconds is 2x as fast the one single threaded process, even though your hardware has not changed.

[Ju]

Oh, look. Someone likes to live a simple life.

If things would be easily scalable linearly we would already have 1000 core cpus. Guess what, it ain't so.

What DX12 does is, it uses multiple threads to overcome the "command queue generation" bottleneck of the API. This is a minor fraction of the render pipeline, like a tiny part. The problem today is, that if with monster CPUs and monster GPUs the CPU generates draw calls and feeds those serialized to the GPU. With a lot of those calls this generates stalls because the "serialization" saturates the through put and the GPU waits for next commands while the CPU still shuffs them in. Now, DX12 addresses this somewhat that it uses multiple cores to generate commands faster and thus avoids stalls. It sure does not makes neither the CPU faster nor the GPU and it sure will not make everything twice as fast all of a sudden. It cuts CPU overhead in half in some situations.

BTW: GPUs can use as many cores as you want, because graphics scale linearly. Technically you could have a core per pixel and it would scale linearly with the number of pixels you would want to paint.

[mezati99]

you mean just like the cloud boost xbone performance to 50% ?! yep i learned not to trust anything they say before i see it

[FrigidDARKNESS]

There you have it folks dx-12 is going to awesome and amazing on the xb1 the future looks great for devs and gamers.

[RosettaStoned]

why are you people receiving disagrees for nothing but interest/excitement?

[The Meerkat]

If you agree with anything XBox related Sony fans press disagree.
If you agree with anything Sony related XBox fans press disagree.

I think you'll find that everyone will agree those statements. /s

[sak500]

jealous followers of the rival platform. Waiting can be pretty boring like back in 2007 waiiiiiting for any decent game on their platform.

[randomass171]

Some people will just disagree sadly. It's kind of a bad system and generates bias. Hopefully N4G will remove it some day.

[cruzngta]

In theory this all sounds great just like the cloud. As a proud owner of both machines I will believe it when I see it. I do hope this will work for XB1 and be a boost for graphics. I think the machine is pretty capable as is but any bump in performance is always welcomed.

[FrigidDARKNESS]

Hmmmmm.......can't wait to hear more on DX-12 Tiled Resources.

[sourav93]

I for one am looking forward to DX-12, not because of the Xbox One, but more so for PC. Yes AMD's Mantle has shown increased performance when compared to DX11 on certain games, but since it's limited to AMD cards, it can be a deal breaker for some. DX12 will be universal, and all cards will be able to benefit from its features. Hopefully, GPUs out now will still be able to run games at decent settings and framerates about a couple of years from now thanks to the "closer to the metal" optimisation of DX12.