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GPU Work Graphs: A Great Day for GPU Programmability
AMD said:If you’re a graphics programmer, today is going to be an exciting day for you: Microsoft® has just released a new DirectX® graphics API called Work Graphs as part of the DirectX Developer Preview today. This API enables you to perform very fine-grained scheduling on graphics cards, which can help you overcome problems previously unachievable for GPU processing and has been a major ask from the graphics community for many years now. For example, complex scene traversal and highly adaptive algorithms can now be implemented more efficiently. Additionally, many algorithms which previously required heroic efforts to get running on the GPU can now be easily expressed in this new API.
D3D12 Work Graphs Preview
MS DirectX Team said:Introduction to work graphs
Work graphs are a system for GPU autonomy in D3D12. Given the increasing prevalence of general compute workloads on GPUs, the motivation is to address some limitations in their programming model, unlock latent GPU capabilities, and enable future evolution.
To start, here are some words on the potential:
This is very much a preview, with reasonably functional drivers available now.Epic Games has been searching and advocating for a better solution to the GPU generated work problem for a while now. UE5 rendering features such as Nanite and Lumen are hitting the limits of the current compute shader paradigm of chains of separate dispatches issued by the CPU.
Work graphs directly address that problem in a way that not only allows us to do things we previously could not but also enables us to do them in ways that should be far easier to write. We have already started exploring how we can optimize our current features with work graphs and are excited about what possibilities they could unlock in the future.
— Brian Karis, Epic Games
The current state reflects a lengthy collaboration between Microsoft and hardware vendors as well as developer input. Looking forward longer term, there should also be a lot of improvement both in software and hardware.
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