Post by smash on May 26, 2014 12:57:40 GMT
Who Is He...someone who knows...lol...
Wolfgang Engel
CTO & Co-Founder Confetti Special Effects Inc.
Wolfgang Engel is the CTO/CEO & Co-Founder of Confetti Special Effects Inc., a think-tank for advanced real-time graphics research for the video game and movie industry. Previously he worked for more than four years in Rockstar's core technology group as the lead graphics programmer. His game credits can be found at www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,158706/. He is the editor of the ShaderX and GPU Pro books, the author of several other books and speaks on graphics programming on conferences world-wide. He is a MVP DirectX since July 2006 and active in several advisory boards in the industry. He also teaches at UCSD the class “GPU Programming”. You can find him on twitter at wolfgangengel. Confetti's website is www.conffx.com
Wow...quite the resume and definitely the right guy to ask about DX12...Is there a BOOM hidden in these words...
Regarding DirectX 12, Engel said to GamingBolt, “I like it. It’s great and it’s a fantastic opportunity to raise the bar again. It works with the same piece of hardware, so it’s the same CPU and the same GPU, and certainly we have much more CPU time to spend.
“The workload on the CPU decreases substantially, because you can utilize better the cores of the CPU. In this way you are less likely to be CPU limited. One of the cool features of modern games is that we have physics, and they have been traditionally implemented on the CPU and as a game developer you have to go back and ask ‘do I have to spend 40% of my CPU time’ on rendering or ‘can I reduce this so that I can use it for physics’ and this is one of the things that DirectX 12 allows you. This makes sure that the developers can get more out of the existing hardware.”
“AMD’s Mantle is also going in the same direction and has the same structural idea, reducing CPU time so that it can be free up for other tasks. One CPU usage case is multiple GPU set ups which is kind of an interesting development because when you have multiple GPUs, say two GPUs, you would not expect to be actually CPU limited. But now the CPU has to feed two GPUs which are really fast, suddenly your CPU becomes the bottleneck. DirectX 12 and Mantle are resolving that situation.”
There are plenty of similarities between DX 12 and Mantle but what about their respective advantages? “The advantage of Mantle is that it’s able to squeeze out of a few more cycles from the AMD platforms. The advantage of DX12 is that it runs on all GPUs,” says Engel.
We know that DX 12 will have a fairly strong impact on PC games when it launches late next year but will it have the same technical impact on the Xbox One? Interestingly, Engel revealed that, “The Xbox One already has an API which is similar to DirectX 12. So Microsoft implemented a driver that is similar to DirectX 12 already on the Xbox One. That freed up a lot of CPU time.”
gamingbolt.com/dx12-to-allow-better-use-of-cpu-cores-xbox-one-already-has-similar-api-for-freeing-up-cpu
...Hmmm...this is THE guy to ask about this stuff so lets hope for some more XB1 information like the eSRAM debate, resolution debate...etc. 