From the early days of the Xbox One, MS has been trying to offload more and more tasks onto the GPU. When the series X was announced, Digital Foundry glossed over a new ability of the GPU to dispatch/schedule work between shaders without data leaving the GPU, in its haste to gush over the shiny new thing that is ray-tracing (pun intended). They may have missed the forest for the trees.
GPU-driven rendering is, in my view, a more consequential development than ray-tracing in its possible ramifications and there are indications that MS/AMD are about to hit the jackpot. The hints are thee-fold:
(1) MS openly advertised this new capability of their consoles though it failed to catch on with tech blogs more concerned with ray-tracing and mesh shaders. Quoting MS PR:
"Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S add hardware, firmware and shader compiler support for GPU work creation that provides powerful capabilities for the GPU to efficiently handle new workloads without any CPU assistance. This provides more flexibility and performance for developers to deliver their graphics visions."
How is MS going to pull this off ? Two further hints:
(2) AMD filed a patent application for the use of a heavily modified command processor (described as a co-processor) to allow for the creation and execution of child threads concurrent with parent threads without the need of a round-trip to the CPU or even main memory. (https://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2020/0089528.html)
(3) The goal of not writing back to main memory implies that the management of task queues and cache behaviour have been massively modified somehow. MS tells us how in another filing:
(https://www.freepatentsonline.com/20200090298.pdf).
GPU-driven rendering is, in my view, a more consequential development than ray-tracing in its possible ramifications and there are indications that MS/AMD are about to hit the jackpot. The hints are thee-fold:
(1) MS openly advertised this new capability of their consoles though it failed to catch on with tech blogs more concerned with ray-tracing and mesh shaders. Quoting MS PR:
"Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S add hardware, firmware and shader compiler support for GPU work creation that provides powerful capabilities for the GPU to efficiently handle new workloads without any CPU assistance. This provides more flexibility and performance for developers to deliver their graphics visions."
How is MS going to pull this off ? Two further hints:
(2) AMD filed a patent application for the use of a heavily modified command processor (described as a co-processor) to allow for the creation and execution of child threads concurrent with parent threads without the need of a round-trip to the CPU or even main memory. (https://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2020/0089528.html)
(3) The goal of not writing back to main memory implies that the management of task queues and cache behaviour have been massively modified somehow. MS tells us how in another filing:
(https://www.freepatentsonline.com/20200090298.pdf).