2016+ CPU/GPU News

[revelator]

one thing i been wondering about is why noone started using the old guillemot / hercules rendering engine (3D prophet also known as the kyro series). It had the benefit of handling detail that you usually needed a far more beefy card for (driver issues not withstanding) by only rendering the portion of the scene in the viewport and not like any other gfx card in a 360" view, saving a lot of GPU gruntwork.

this also ment the card could get away with a somewhat smaller cooler

[revelator]

well what do you know nvidia actually used powervr's tiling engine in the maxwell and pascal lineup and many smartphones today use it as well.

[nbohr1more]

On 8/30/2024 at 9:30 PM, revelator said:

well what do you know nvidia actually used powervr's tiling engine in the maxwell and pascal lineup and many smartphones today use it as well.

wow!

I heard that they had their own tiling \ tbdr tech from their 3Dfx acquisition.

I'm still shocked that AMD made it's tiling tech require engine coders to request the behavior. Maybe RDNA4 will finally fix that.

[revelator]

Yeah was a bit of a shocker when i discovered it. But in retrospect i think that was the main reason for nvidia to aquire both firms tech as the tiling engine cuts out a huge gpu hog.

[revelator]

STB was povervr and 3dfx collaborated with them to create the voodoo cards, when nvidia aquired 3dfx they also aquired some of STB's tech for one the tiling engine, from 3dfx itself mostly there antialiasing tech and SLI allthough nvidias differs somewhat from that used on the voodoo cards.

It goes to show how much muscle is required to render modern games that gfx cards need to use such tech to alleviate the strain on the GPU and even then we still need DLSS or FSR for the more heavy titles .

[revelator]

as for AMD they are in a bit of a bind with said tech as they are basically forced to reinvent the wheel, might turn out good might turn out a bust only time will tell.

[revelator]

Hmm looks like the upcoming FSR 4.0 will be AI powered, FSR 1.0 used spatial upscaling while 2.0 and 3.0 used temporal while 3.0 also added frame generation to the table. Speculation seems to point at it using the native DXR features which will mean any card capable of using DX12PRO will support it (if that statement holds water only time will tell).

[jaxa]

10 hours ago, revelator said:

Hmm looks like the upcoming FSR 4.0 will be AI powered, FSR 1.0 used spatial upscaling while 2.0 and 3.0 used temporal while 3.0 also added frame generation to the table. Speculation seems to point at it using the native DXR features which will mean any card capable of using DX12PRO will support it (if that statement holds water only time will tell).

I hadn't heard the latter speculation.

All details are very much in the air. I imagine they will time the release for RDNA4, but we'll have to see if they allow it to run on older gens, APUs, or even XDNA NPUs. There's talk of a mobile focus so I wouldn't be surprised if it was optimized to use XDNA2 (~50 TOPS) out of the gate.

[revelator]

yeah for the most part it seems this was intended for steamdecks / mobile etc. though it would be odd indeed if they only developed it for the mobile segment . the 7000 series alledgedly has something like nvidias tensor cores on chip but they are unused atm. otherwise id suspect a lot of angry AMD users.

[revelator]

also looks like it will be used for frame generation albeit atm it seems framegen works just fine on older nvidia cards if using FSR 3 it might lead to even better results .

starfield runs quite fine with it for one, even on high with the 3070 in 3440x1440 (ultrawide).

[jaxa]

7 hours ago, revelator said:

yeah for the most part it seems this was intended for steamdecks / mobile etc. though it would be odd indeed if they only developed it for the mobile segment . the 7000 series alledgedly has something like nvidias tensor cores on chip but they are unused atm. otherwise id suspect a lot of angry AMD users.

The way I see it, if the goal is to match DLSS on upscaling very low resolution to 1080p without looking like total crap, then the major beneficiary will be the handhelds. The older FSRs are better when you already have a relatively high input resolution.

[revelator]

Hmm you could be right  its not actually that far of even now though dlss still wins on performance, the gap has shortened somewhat. With hardware support it might even be a serious contender.

[revelator]

one thing dx12pro had going for it was mesh shaders (alan wake2) even though it was actually created to cut out a good deal of the shader chain alan wake 2 might be a poor example as for the performance gains as that game instead opted to instead make it as gorgeous as humanely possible. hell even a 4090 can barely hit 60 fps with everything cranked up to 11 in it. in the following years i guess most of the performance gains will be software based.

AMD for one seems to be going that route now branding itself as a software company 1st and a hardware producer 2nd.

[revelator]

minor edit it was called dx12 ultimate.

mesh shaders are also possible with vulkan (all cards that support vulkan 1.85 ?) and in opengl but so far only for nvidia cards (turing and up), AMD should have the opengl version shortly if i hear right.

[revelator]

https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMD-Gfx-Drivers/issues/4