AMD begins beta tests of Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling

[GDRRiley]

Summary

AMD just like NVIDIA has started to roll out support for windows 10s new Hardware Accelerated GPU Scheduling with a beta driver released on Monday.

 

Quotes

Quote

Following last week’s release of NVIDIA’s first Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling-enabled video card driver, AMD this week has stepped up to the plate to do the same. The Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.5.1 Beta with Graphics Hardware Scheduling driver (version 20.10.17.04) has been posted to AMD’s website, and as the name says on the tin, the driver offers support for Windows 10’s new hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling technology.

 

In the meantime, AMD seems to be taking a cautious approach here. The beta driver has been published outside their normal release channels and only supports products using AMD’s Navi 10 GPUs – so the Radeon 5700 series, 5600 series, and their mobile variants. Support for the Navi 14-based 5500 series is notably absent, as is Vega support for both discrete and integrated GPUs.

 

My thoughts

Cool to see new features roll out but the limit amount of AMD GPUs supported so far and the lack of any knowledge of what this will do means I don't see any need to rush and update GPU drivers.

 

Sources

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15886/amd-publishes-first-beta-driver-with-win10-hardware-gpu-scheduling-support

[WereCatf]

I was just googling yesterday, if Intel has yet released support for this feature and wondered when AMD will do it as well. Seems like AMD beat Intel to the punch here. When Intel eventually does get around to doing it, it'd be really interesting to see if how much -- if at all -- this feature improves things across all three manufacturers. Might not do much for maximum FPS, but my understanding is that it would reduce framerate dips.

 

Perhaps a good video for LTT (Andy?) to explore, since they have got a good number of various kinds of GPUs -- including iGPUs -- to play around with?

[GDRRiley]

Just now, WereCatf said:

I was just googling yesterday, if Intel has yet released support for this feature and wondered when AMD will do it as well. Seems like AMD beat Intel to the punch here. When Intel eventually does get around to doing it, it'd be really interesting to see if how much -- if at all -- this feature improves things across all three manufacturers. Might not do much for maximum FPS, but my understanding is that it would reduce framerate dips.

 

Perhaps a good video for LTT (Andy?) to explore, since they have got a good number of various kinds of GPUs -- including iGPUs -- to play around with?

so far it is supported by drivers but nothing makes use of it. It will take time till we see anything actually using it. and there are reports of on Nvida cards some games not liking it on.

[WereCatf]

6 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

so far it is supported by drivers

Not according to Intel. Intel says they are "looking into it."

[GDRRiley]

3 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

Not according to Intel. Intel says they are "looking into it."

The 2 companies where I suspect it may actually matter support it, unless Intels GPUs end up amazing I won’t care if they have it. Grandma watching YouTube won’t be able to tell. 

[Master Disaster]

I was wondering why AMD haven't released a driver in over a month. Guess I'll grab this later on see if it helps/hinders anything.

[Master Disaster]

29 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

so far it is supported by drivers but nothing makes use of it. It will take time till we see anything actually using it. and there are reports of on Nvida cards some games not liking it on.

Not according to Microsoft, its a hardware feature that is being exposed by the driver to Windows. Once its enabled it is working, the software does not need to be changed at all.

 

They're asking anybody who enables it and notices any regression to contact them. That's not something they'd need to do if what you said was true.

[Stahlmann]

Does anybody actually know what this is meant to do?

[Master Disaster]

3 hours ago, Stahlmann98 said:

Does anybody actually know what this is meant to do?

Taken from MS...

Quote

It has been almost 14 years since the introduction of the Windows Display Driver Model 1.0 (WDDM) and with it the introduction of GPU scheduling in Windows. Few likely remember the pre-WDDM days where applications could simply submit work to the GPU as much as they wanted. They submitted to a global queue where it was executed in a strict “first to submit, first to execute” fashion. These very rudimentary scheduling schemes were workable, at a time where most GPU applications were full screen games, being run one at a time.

 

With the transition to a broad set of applications using the GPU for richer graphics and animations, the platform needed to better prioritize GPU work to ensure a responsive user experience. Thus, the WDDM GPU scheduler was born.

 

Over time we have significantly enhanced the GPU scheduler at the heart of WDDM, supporting additional features and scenarios with each new WDDM version. However, throughout its evolution, one aspect of the scheduler was unchanged. We have always had a high-priority thread running on the CPU that coordinates, prioritizes, and schedules the work submitted by various applications.

 

This approach to scheduling the GPU has some fundamental limitations in terms of submission overhead, as well as latency for the work to reach the GPU. These overheads have been mostly masked by the way applications have traditionally been written. For example, an application would typically do GPU work on frame N, and have the CPU run ahead and work on preparing GPU commands for frame N+1. This buffering of GPU commands into batches allows an application to submit just a few times per frame, minimizing the cost of scheduling and ensuring good CPU-GPU execution parallelism.

 

An inherent side effect of buffering between CPU and GPU is that the user experiences increased latency. User input is picked up by the CPU during “frame N+1” but is not rendered by the GPU until the following frame. There is a fundamental tension between latency reduction and submission/scheduling overhead. Applications may submit more frequently, in smaller batches to reduce latency or they may submit larger batches of work to reduce submission and scheduling overhead.

@CPotter This one would make a good tech quickie.

[Doobeedoo]

3 hours ago, huilun02 said:

Its just the logistics work of sending stuff to the GPU for processing. You want it done in such a way that everything in the foreground is priority for update so it looks smooth and responsive.

 

Situations where this is critical are:

• Many apps open on the screen
• Many browser tabs with video and animated elements
• Tabbing through desktops and full screen applications

This is literally me. 

[Doobeedoo]

I did have this driver for a while now. But good stuff. 

[FirehawkV21]

It will certainly be interesting. Especially for people that use Hybrid Graphics. I kind of doubt that Intel will enable it for all GPUs that they maintain (the HD Graphics 520 is stuck on WDDM 2.1 while the R5 M430 is using WDDM 2.7) but it would be cool to see all of them support it. And I wonder how well it will work when two GPUs do different stuff.

[RejZoR]

7 hours ago, huilun02 said:

Its just the logistics work of sending stuff to the GPU for processing. You want it done in such a way that everything in the foreground is priority for update so it looks smooth and responsive.

 

Situations where this is critical are:

• Many apps open on the screen
• Many browser tabs with video and animated elements
• Tabbing through desktops and full screen applications

This is traditionally done on the CPU, so there is overhead on the CPU. If it happens to be on a core/thread that is being maxed out, its function could be interrupted. Or on a weak CPU it can contend with other processes for resources.

 

With the work taken over by the graphics card, it can be done more efficiently. However with modern CPUs now being so powerful and with so many cores, you probably don't see the benefit in vast majority of cases.

 

To be playing a full screen video game there isn't much needed from scheduling. And the work shifted to the GPU doesn't help when the GPU is almost always the bottleneck when playing games.

We live in an age where people think having few apps and browser open is a heavy GPU workload. Google Chrome just normalized this idiocy I think because of how fat the browser is.

[StDragon]

5 hours ago, RejZoR said:

We live in an age where people think having few apps and browser open is a heavy GPU workload. Google Chrome just normalized this idiocy I think because of how fat the browser is.

Firefox is just as bad. It's ludicrous that a few megabytes of HTML (including images) hoovers up a 1 GB of RAM. Explain that shit!? 

[Metal_HorseCrab]

14 hours ago, Stahlmann98 said:

Does anybody actually know what this is meant to do?

Schedule next Mondays Corona Virus news.

[RejZoR]

6 hours ago, StDragon said:

Firefox is just as bad. It's ludicrous that a few megabytes of HTML (including images) hoovers up a 1 GB of RAM. Explain that shit!? 

Dunno, Firefox works fine on my crappy little netbook with Atom CPU and 2GB RAM...

[TOMPPIX]

Oculus™ VR headsets may not display content or may experience severe performance drops with Hardware Scheduling enabled.

[Samfisher]

10 hours ago, StDragon said:

Firefox is just as bad. It's ludicrous that a few megabytes of HTML (including images) hoovers up a 1 GB of RAM. Explain that shit!? 

Cos Firefox itself still has to run?  If that 1 tab is 1GB however then we have a problem.  Also please link that page so others can test it.

[Master Disaster]

Doesn't work with my 5700XT.

 

Got the BETA driver installed, rebooted and there's no option to enable it.

 

Edit - Anybody running an AMD GPU, currently has 20.5.1 installed and wants to enable HWS needs to DDU the old driver. Even doing the drivers built in "Clean Install" option does not work. You MUST DDU the old driver before installing the BETA.

 

You gotta wonder why AMD called it 20.5.1 Beta when 20.5.1 already exists as a full WHQL release and it was released in June?

 

You can tell you have it installed because it says 20.5.1 HWS in the Adrenaline CC

 

[grayperview]

It works you have to go to display settings and graphics options in windows to switch it on, I have briefly tested it, got more stutter in my golf game and slightly lower bench score in Valley, Dishonered ran fine though. Like i say only tested it briefly with my 5700xt.