Question DirectX 12 now allows the CPU to directly access VRAM!

[igor_kavinski]

Microsoft's new DirectX 12 Agility SDK opens the door to direct CPU VRAM access

The first of the new features, known as GPU upload heaps, decreases dynamic random access memory (DRAM) utilization by allowing the CPU to access the GPU's video...

www.techspot.com

Can't believe it took them this long to implement this common sense feature but maybe they were waiting for PCIe 5.0 slots to be widely available in mobos? This could be the feature that causes PCIe 4.0 to show its age, especially if multiple CPU threads start accessing VRAM over the PCIe bus.

 

[KompuKare]

Story date stamp: 1st of April...

 

[Hitman928]

Story date stamp: 1st of April...

Unfortunate coincidence in the timing. Original source is an official Microsoft blog post before April Fools’ day.

 

[KompuKare]

Ah. I had dismissed it due to, well, the date!

 

[Mopetar]

Even if it were release on April 1st, it doesn't quite have the same kind of obvious prank element to it. If it were meant to be a joke they would have said something like the CPU being able to directly write to the GPU's BIOS as an extra form of cache.

This is the sort of thing that makes obvious sense to develop as well as something that developers would want and have use for.

 

[misuspita]

How's the latency of something like this?

 

[Dave3000]

Is at least 16GB of VRAM recommended for this feature? In a situation, what happens if a game that will take advantage of this feature uses up to 12GB VRAM (for graphics only) and up to 12GB RAM and the video card being used has 12GB VRAM? Does the benefit of this feature cancel out in this case?

 

[igor_kavinski]

This has to be implemented by the game developer in their game engine and it would benefit only those games that depend on processing data needed by both the CPU and GPU. Games that stream data from NVMe SSD probably won't see much benefit.

 

[n0x1ous]

pretty cool stuff