Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: TechnoD11 on February 24, 2015, 01:56:47 pm
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This looks too good to be true:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-directx12-amd-nvidia,28606.html
But I seriously hope this isn't. This would be fantastic for the consumer and would allow for more diverse video card arrangements
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Sounds good in theory, but an utter nightmare to work with.
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The manufacturers would still need to make them play nice with each other, which seems exceedingly unlikely. Also they are talking about two GPUs rendering the same frame like it's a new thing. Way back when SLI started I remember seeing articles that described precisely this happening. Even so far as "tiling" the frame or unevenly splitting it based on detail in each section to split the load more evenly. In fact, don't the two GPUs HAVE to work together on the same frame to get that super-ultra anti-aliasing effect?
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Yes, and there are tons of reasons why you don't want two dissimilar GPUs doing the same workload. Imagine a situation where you pair an Intel integrated GPU with the latest and greatest from nV or AMD; what exactly is the Intel GPU going to do to improve performance? Even in situations where the GPUs are more evenly matched, like for example in a Laptop, you're still going to be limited to what the slow GPU can do.
There are other, more useful ways in which to utilize the ability to operate two GPUs at once, like doing GPGPU work on the weaker one, but even there, the sheer amount of possible configurations will make the task of testing a game even harder than it is right now.
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I'm reminded of the Lucid Virtu software that used to be bundled with Intel I series motherboards. I use it to enable quicksync for encoding video while still having my NV as the card driving my single monitor, but IIRC, the MVP version would allow for multiple cards from different manufactures work in a SLI-kind of way.
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Wouldn't another problem be card-unique bugs and deprecated calls that might occur with one card but not with the other? Unless you can choose to use just one card for some games.
This would be an impressive accomplishment, though.