NVIDIA sends phrase this morning that the corporate has posted their first DirectX 12 Ultimate-compliant driver. Published as model 451.48 – the primary driver out of NVIDIA’s new Release 450 driver department – the brand new driver is the primary launch from the corporate to explicitly help the most recent iteration of DirectX 12, enabling help for options resembling DXR 1.1 ray tracing and tier 2 variable price shading. As effectively, this driver additionally permits help for {hardware} accelerated GPU scheduling.
As a fast refresher, DirectX 12 Ultimate is Microsoft’s newest iteration of the DirectX 12 graphics API, with Microsoft utilizing it to synchronize the state of the API between current-generation PCs and the forthcoming Xbox Series X console, in addition to to set a well-defined function baseline for future sport growth. Based across the capabilities of present era GPUs (specifically: NVIDIA Turing) and the Xbox Series X’s AMD RDNA2-derrived GPU, DirectX 12 Ultimate introduces a number of new GPU options underneath a brand new function tier (12_2). This consists of an up to date model of DirectX’s ray tracing API, DXR 1.1, in addition to tier 2 variable price shading, mesh shaders, and sampler suggestions. The software program groundwork for this has been laid within the newest model of Windows 10, model 2004, and now could be being enabled in GPU drivers for the primary time.
| DirectX 12 Feature Levels | |||||
| 12_2 (DX12 Ult.) |
12_1 | 12_0 | |||
| GPU Architectures (Introduced as of) |
NVIDIA: Turing AMD: RDNA2 Intel: Xe? |
NVIDIA: Maxwell 2 AMD: Vega Intel: Gen9 |
NVIDIA: Maxwell 2 AMD: Hawaii Intel: Gen9 |
||
| Ray Tracing (DXR 1.1) |
Yes | No | No | ||
| Variable Rate Shading (Tier 2) |
Yes | No | No | ||
| Mesh Shaders | Yes | No | No | ||
| Sampler Feedback | Yes | No | No | ||
| Conservative Rasterization | Yes | Yes | No | ||
| Raster Order Views | Yes | Yes | No | ||
| Tiled Resources (Tier 2) |
Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| Bindless Resources (Tier 2) |
Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
| Typed UAV Load | Yes | Yes | Yes | ||
In the case of NVIDIA’s latest video playing cards, the underlying Turing structure has supported these options because the very starting. However, their use has been partially restricted to video games counting on NVIDIA’s proprietary function extensions, resulting from an absence of standardized API help. Overall it’s taken a lot of the final two years to get the whole function set added to DirectX, and whereas NVIDIA isn’t hesitating to make use of this second to proclaim their GPU superiority as the primary vendor to ship DirectX 12 Ultimate help, to some extent it’s undoubtedly vindication of the funding the corporate put in to baking these options into Turing.
In any case, enabling DirectX 12 Ultimate help is a crucial step for the corporate, although one which’s principally about laying the groundwork for sport builders, and finally, future video games. At this level no previously-announced video games have confirmed that they’ll be utilizing DX12U, although that is only a matter of time, particularly with the Xbox Series X launching in just a few months.
Perhaps the extra attention-grabbing side of this driver launch, although solely tangential to DirectX 12 Ultimate help, is that NVIDIA is enabling help for {hardware} accelerated GPU scheduling. This mysterious function was added to the Windows show driver stack with WDDM 2.7 (delivery in Win10 2004), and as alluded to by the identify, it permits GPUs to extra immediately handle their VRAM. Traditionally Windows itself has finished lots of the VRAM administration for GPUs, so this can be a distinctive change in issues.
At a excessive degree, NVIDIA is claiming that {hardware} accelerated GPU scheduling ought to provide minor enhancements to the person expertise, largely by decreasing latency…
