Originally Posted by Christophe Riccio
I don't think it would allow new rendering techniques but it could allow thing we could do in cross fire / SLI like rendering simultaneously two frames at a time. Also it could allows to rendering independent rendering passes simultaneously which could provide a better utilization of the hardware as typically each rendering pass has different GPU hardware bottlenecks. For example if we could do the rendering of the shadows and the some shading simultaneously.
I am not completely sure about the consequence for the fixed function hardware. There are already different task live in a GPU. Most probably the multi command processor would have to share the pool of graphics context. (8 in Southern Islands if I remember correctly). I am more concerned here by the CPU side usage: We could create 2 OpenGL contexts and actually submit different commands simultaneously on different threads.
Overall, just duplicating the command processor seems an expensive idea to me in term of transistors count and an idea that doesn't really scale across GPU architectures / low-end vs high-end GPUs. I would rather want the IHV focus on things that will have a real impact for the rendering like programmable blending and multi draw indirect. I also think graphics programmers should thing twice when they want to submit multi command buffer simultaneously because it doesn't make any sense from a hardware design point of view unless if we add multi command processors in the future.
The x1 is made for the future its way ahead of the game everything NVIDIA , AMD, and Open gl5 is happening on the X1 via DX 12 the hardware is different its so many things inside the system that old engines just can't take full advantage.
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