There’s a big shake-up coming to DirectX if reports coming out of Microsoft are to be believed. Apparently DirectX 12 will support the unprecedented move of letting multiple-GPUs, regardless of origin, work together.
That means Nvidia’s GeForce and AMD’s Radeon lines could ‘team-up’ inside the PC, and developers could make full use of them. This new DirectX is switching to Split Frame Rendering.
Currently you need two very similar GPUs in order for them to work together, but the work load is ‘mirrored’ across them and not efficiently split. This means while you might have, say, 3GB VRAM for each card installed you don’t get to enjoy a combined 6GB VRAM.
Now with Split Frame Rendering, each GPU you’ve got linked together effectively works on its own part of the screen to render, and so that means those two 3GB VRAM get spread around, giving you a collective resource pool.
According to reports from Tom’s Hardware, the new method in DirectX 12 treats all your graphics cards as ”a single, more powerful graphics card. Thus, users get the robustness of a running a single GPU, but with multiple graphics cards.”
Currently SLI or Crossfire set-ups of multiple-GPUs face numerous problems, with driver and game updates usually slow or none existent to treat the problem. This sounds like all that could be a thing of the past, should DirectX 12 package them altogether as one.
It’s not a perfect system but it’s a huge step in the right direction. Check out the full report for more. There should be more to learn about DirectX 12 from GDC 2015, which runs March 2-6 in California.