New Nvidia GPU driver adds full support for DX12 Ultimate and Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling

[Remij 4,670]

Basically the hardware accelerated GPU scheduling allows the GPU to better manage and directly access it's video memory, improving latency and performance, especially in minimum and average fps.  It also works regardless of API used, so DX12, Vulkan, and OpenGL.

 

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As more hardware vendors move toward a hardware based scheduling model, where work is submitted to the GPU directly from user mode and where the GPU manages the various queue of work itself, it is necessary to eliminate the need for the video memory manager to inspect and patch every command buffer before submission to a GPU engine.

 

To achieve this, WDDM v2 supports GPU virtual addressing. In this model, each process gets assigned a unique GPU virtual address space in which every GPU context to execute in. An allocation, created or opened by a process, gets assigned a unique GPU virtual address within that process GPU virtual address space that remains constant and unique for the lifetime of the allocation. This allows the user mode driver to reference allocations through their GPU virtual address without having to worry about the underlying physical memory changing through its lifetime.

 

There's some nice gains to be had.  A lot of games are performing noticeably better for a lot of people.  One user posted RDR2 improvements using the Vulkan API with GPU scheduling on with the new driver vs the old driver without it.

 

It's important to note that these gains aren't specifically due to GPU scheduling by itself, but alongside that, this new driver series includes new Vulkan drivers which perform better across the board.

 

This is on a GTX 1080 8GB:

 

New driver, scheduler ON

 

Old driver, No GPU scheduler support

 

Very nice improvements all around.

 

DX12U and Vulkan are definitely going to replace DX11 for the majority of big 3rd party games now.  We've already seen the bigger ones mostly make the switch already with their engines supporting it and releasing alongside a DX11 renderer.  I think with the new gen, it's basically going to push DX11 out of the equation for all but smaller games that want to support the most hardware possible and the like.

[Teh_Diplomat 2,054]