Exciting news about DirectX12

[MrRiplEy[H]]

According to Tomshardware and news sites DX12 will enable you to combine Nvidia and Radeon cards together running parallel in the same machine. Further more you will be able to combine video rams of several cards so if you have a 2Gb card and another, DX can utilize 4Gb of ram. Very interesting developments ahead.

[zack1234]

R u sure or just dreamt it

[BoilerDown]

I hope it actually works.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

I hope it actually works.

From how the article was made it would seem that you could combine any two (or more) cards together and DX could stitch their performance into one pool. That would be super cool, you could add on any old card to give some free boost as long as your motherboard has free pci-e slots.

[100Coogn]

I wonder if DX12 will be made available for Windows 7. 
I've read some articles that say it will, then others that say it won't.   
I hope it will.  I don't want to have to buy Windows 10 just for DX12...

Coogan

[Skuzzy]

So, we will have a virtual video card, implemented in software to work with, with no control on who will be doing what.  Wonderful. 

So shaders which run best on NVidia might end up running on an ATI card.  Or vice-versa.  Worse.  We will not be able to by-pass the DirectX pipeline and write the shaders directly to the video card.  A method employed by many games today in order to get some performance out of DirectX as the pipeline has gotten so bloated.

The realities of such an implementation will never match the marketing spiel.  So excuse me if I am not excited.

[BoilerDown]

Maybe it benches all aspects of every GPU it has access to and runs whatever feature only where its fastest to do so.

Hahaha.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Yep I guess all the hype and talk about DX12 enabling higher performance and closer to bare hardware access than ever before are all just lies. Maybe all those graphically stunning applications that are made using these bloated and crappy interfaces are just trickery of the eye. Not real.

Oh and Dx12 will be Win10 exclusive.

[Skuzzy]

Yep I guess all the hype and talk about DX12 enabling higher performance and closer to bare hardware access than ever before are all just lies. Maybe all those graphically stunning applications that are made using these bloated and crappy interfaces are just trickery of the eye. Not real.

Oh and Dx12 will be Win10 exclusive.

Now you are talking Apples and Oranges.  Yes, you can write to the hardware, if you do not want to use both AMD and NVidia video cards.  If you want to use this new 'exciting' feature, you have to go through the bloated DX pipeline.

Any performance gains have been done by going outside the DX pipeline.  That is not to say there have not been improvements.  They tend to be overshadowed by other issues.

[Charge]

I doubt that data transfers over PCI bus, CPU to GPUs or GPU to GPU, would eat any advantage such system would have. I.e. it will be hardware restricted after all. Anybody have an idea if the PCI-e can handle direct communication between devices or does it all go through north bridge?

The SLI bridge is used to reduce bandwidth constraints and send data between both graphics cards directly. It is possible to run SLI without using the bridge connector on a pair of low-end to mid-range graphics cards (e.g. 7100GS or 6600GT) with NVIDIA's Forceware drivers 80.XX or later. Since these graphics cards do not use as much bandwidth, data can be relayed through just the chipsets on the motherboard. However, if no SLI bridge is used on two high-end graphics cards, the performance suffers severely as the chipset does not have enough bandwidth.

Best option would probably be a card with multiple GPUs.

-C+