GeForce 980Ti will feature full DirectX 12 support (first official card?)

[Bouzoo]

So this is the first officially announced full DX12 card if I'm not wrong. Also it is the first card to use FEATURE LEVEL 12_1 and 12_0. Maybe that means other cards (Maxwell cards) might get those options via drivers? Who knows, maybe we might get surprised (I don't see why Titan X at least wouldn't have that). Maybe this is just some sort or marketing so it sells better, since it's releasing at the same time as Fiji XT.

EDIT: Just watched the review on this, other Maxwel cards and Tongs GPUs will use it.

 

Our buddies at Videocardz were able to confirm a very significant bit that shows how Maxwell is designed to be fully compliant with new generation technology that is the DirectX 12 API. We have talked a lot about DirectX 12 and detailed various features such as the recent Multiadapter tech that will allow use of the dormant iGPUs on PCs and combining VRAM pools across cards, supporting Multi-GPU configurations naively. The GeForce 900 series cards were designed from scratch to support these new technologies and GTX 980 Ti will leverage support by being the first DirectX 12 enabled card with Feature Level 12_1 support that allows conservative raster and raster order views aside from the Level 12_0 features that include Tiled Resources, Typed UAV access and Bindless textures. NVIDIA also confirms that they will have Maxwell doing Asynchronus compute that AMD has recently shown off the benefits for in their slides. Their will be more control over hardware by the developers and low overhead will allow more draw calls and better performance for PC hardware.

 

 

 

 

This does not mean it's the only card that will support DX12. Older cards will as well, but you won't be able to use all features.

The earlier confusion comes following yesterday's two-hour long Windows 10 press conference on Microsoft's Redmond campus. In a meeting with a gathering of press to show off the Xbox App for Windows 10, Mike Ybarra, partner director of program management who leads engineering efforts for console and PC, responded to the following question about DirectX 12 support of graphics cards.

 

"To get the full support of DX12 will users need to get a new graphics card?"

To get the "full benefits of DX12," Ybarra replied, "the answer is yes."

"There will be DX 11.1 cards that take advantage of a lot of the driver and software tech that we're bringing in Windows 10, but if you want the full benefits of DX12, you're going to need a DX12 card."

 

The confusion seems to lie in the difference between full support of DX12 features and support of some DX12 features.

 

Sources: 1, 2

 

About DX12 support

Edited May 31, 2015 by Bouzoo

[TheKDub]

Cool, now if only the 970 and 980 fully supported dx12... or do they?

[Bouzoo]

I thought that pretty much all of the more recent cards would support DX12, hopefully they will...

 

No they will, iirc everything back as 400 series for Nvidia will, but these are some new features, probably because Maxwell has new stuff in it.

[Commander_Z]

uhh, i think all 700 series cards as well as the 900 series all support DX12 out of the box

 

I know my Strix 970 does, says so on the box

[ACatWithThumbs]

uhh, i think all 700 series cards as well as the 900 series all support DX12 out of the box

 

I know my Strix 970 does, says so on the box

900 series has full support for DX12.

400 series and up have only support the optimization features but not the new graphic effects.

[Senzelian]

It can not really be the first, as the TitanX is practically the same card. Just with more Cuda Cores and VRAM...

[Bouzoo]

It can not really be the first, as the TitanX is practically the same card. Just with more Cuda Cores and VRAM...

 

Afaik it's the first officially announced DX12 card. Maybe they somewhere announced that Titan X is gonna be full DX12 but I couldn't find it.

[That Norwegian Guy]

As long as older cards get the multi-GPU benefits of VRAM pooling and mismatch-matching, I don't care. This just means new render techniques, same deal every new API. Like how godrays and SSAO arrived with DX10, and depth of field came with DX11.

 

The rasters mentioned in the feature set seem to indicate mostly new AA techniques. Which,  we have far too many of and CSAA is old and still better than all the shit like TXAA, FXAA (which admittedly is so light it can be considered good) and MSAA.

[Senzelian]

Afaik it's the first officially announced DX12 card. Maybe they somewhere announced that Titan X is gonna be full DX12 but I couldn't find it.

Ah okay, that's what you mean. Yeah, I think that's true. 

[ACatWithThumbs]

Afaik it's the first officially announced DX12 card. Maybe they somewhere announced that Titan X is gonna be full DX12 but I couldn't find it.

The 970 and 980 were also both official DX12 cards it's even on the box:

[Bouzoo]

 

The 970 and 980 were also both official DX12 cards it's even on the box:

Yes, but it was never officially announced by Nvidia those 2 specifically would have full DX12 support. We can speculate if that means "It will support some features" or "It will support all features". Now we have it from them.

[Dietrichw]

Afaik it's the first officially announced DX12 card. Maybe they somewhere announced that Titan X is gonna be full DX12 but I couldn't find it.

If I remember correctly AMD already confirmed that Tonga and Hawaii have full directx support

Edit- actually the 980ti doesn't have "full" directx support just a bit more than v1 maxwell

[Maslofski]

fuck

[Sidiox]

If I remember correctly AMD already confirmed that Tonga and Hawaii have full directx support

Edit- actually the 980ti doesn't have "full" directx support just a bit more than v1 maxwell image.jpg

And v1 maxwell is? The rest of 900 or just the 750ti? Because this chart, if true, doesn't look very good for the 900 series

[Opcode]

AMD's GCN architecture (even the 4 year old version) is the only architecture on the market with full DirectX 12 compliance.

 

 

And v1 maxwell is? The rest of 900 or just the 750ti? Because this chart, if true, doesn't look very good for the 900 series

First generation Maxwell is the GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti.

[Linusinium]

Entire Maxwell family is dx12 compatible but dx12.1 compatibility is on 980TI &Titan X only.

[Bouzoo]

Entire Maxwell family is dx12 compatible but dx12.1 compatibility is on 980TI &Titan X only.

Linus said on his review that all Maxwell cards are gonna support those features (I wasn't sure whether to call that 12.1).

[Bouzoo]

AMD's GCN architecture (even the 4 year old version) is the only architecture on the market with full DirectX 12 compliance.

 

 

First generation Maxwell is the GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti.

Interesting, but may I ask where did you find this picture? First time seeing it.

[Linusinium]

Linus said on his review that all Maxwell cards are gonna support those features (I wasn't sure whether to call that 12.1).

 Some dx 12.1 features can only be software emulated on non dx12.1 compliant cards. And yes, 12.1 is how it's listed on nvidia's official specifications, only on the 980ti and TitanX.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=396651

 

 

 

 

1- First Conservative rasterization, which will be used along with multi projection to create a new global illumination system, VXGI. Both are hardware accelerated. Conservative rasterization can also be used for accurate tiling and collision detection. Conservative rasterization can actually be used in older hw too (albeit in software mode) but slower as it was an old feature never used but available as in general shader hw but not in a specific function hardware way. As it will be required for next-gen applications (such as voxelizations ie. VXGI) it became specific function hw accelerated. Multi projection is also hw accelerated for instancing geometry for different uses once and for all, as previously when instancing the same geometry, game developers were slacking and making each geomtery to be drawn each and every time in the timeline of application. When the geometry wasn't used it was scrapped, but when it was called once more, it had to draw it once again. Also for a specific time in the application each face of the same geometry had to be calculated (as in each face of the cube) but can't be instanced for creating a voxel.

First off Official Nvidia GTX 980 Whitepaper: http://international.download.nvidia...aper_FINAL.PDF

Details about these two features from GTX 980 whitepaper:

Hardware Acceleration for VXGI – Multi-Projection and Conservative Raster

One exciting property of VXGI is that it is very scalable—by changing the density of the voxel grid, and the amount of tracing of that voxel grid that is performed per pixel, it is possible for VXGI to run across a wide range of hardware, including Kepler GPUs, console hardware, etc. However, for Maxwell it was an important goal to identify opportunities for significant acceleration of VXGI that would enable us to demonstrate its full potential and achieve the highest possible level of realism.

As described above, VXGI based lighting has three major phases—the first two are new, accomplishing the generation of a new voxel data structure, while the third stage is a modification of the existing

lighting phase of real time rendering. Therefore, to enable VXGI as a real-time dynamic lighting technique, it is important that the new work—the creation of the voxel data structure—is as fast as possible, as this is the part of VXGI that is new work for the renderer. Fast voxelization ensures that changes in lighting or the position of objects in the scene can be reflected immediately in the lighting calculation. With this in mind, it was a top priority for Maxwell to implement hardware acceleration for this stage.

One important observation is that the voxelization stage is challenged by the need to analyze the same scene geometry from many views—each face of the voxel cube—to determine coverage and lighting. We call this property of rendering the same scene from multiple views “multi-projection.” It turns out that multi-projection is a property of other important rendering algorithms as well. For example, cube maps (used commonly for assisting with modelling of reflections) require rendering to six faces. And as will be discussed in more depth later, shadow maps can also be rendered at multiple resolutions.

Therefore, acceleration of multi-projection is a broadly useful capability. Today, multi-projection can be implemented either by explicitly sending geometry to the hardware multiple times, or by expanding

geometry in the geometry shader; however, neither approach is particularly efficient. The specific capability that we added to speed up multi-projection is called “Viewport Multicast.” With this feature, Maxwell can use dedicated hardware to automatically broadcast input geometry to any number of desired render targets, avoiding geometry shader overhead. In addition, we added some hardware

support for certain kinds of per viewport processing that are important to this application.

“Conservative Raster” is the second feature in Maxwell that accelerates the voxelization process. As illustrated in the following Figure 11, conservative raster is an alternate algorithm for triangle rasterization. 

In traditional rasterization, a triangle covers a pixel if it covers a specific sample point within that pixel, for example, the pixel center in the following picture. Therefore with traditional rasterization, the four purple pixels would be considered “covered” by the triangle. With conservative rasterization rules on the other hand, a pixel is considered covered if any part of the pixel is covered by any part of the triangle. In the following picture, the seven range pixels are also “covered” by conservative rasterization rules. Hardware support for conservative raster is very helpful for the coverage phase of voxelization. In this phase, fractional coverage of each voxel needs to be determined with high accuracy to ensure the voxelized 3D grid represents the original 3D triangle data properly. Conservative raster helps the hardware to perform this calculation efficiently; without conservative raster there are workarounds that can be used to achieve the same result, but they are much more expensive.

The benefit of these features can be measured by running the voxelization stage of VXGI both ways (i.e., with the new features enabled vs. disabled). Figure 12 below compares the performance of voxelization on “San Miguel,” a popular test scene for global illumination algorithms—GTX 980 achieves a 3x speedup when these features are enabled. 

2- Secondly Volume Tiled Resources that will be hardware accelerated. Which is actually just usage of an old feature in a new way. As previously unused Tiled resources (except for a handful of games) can be extended into the 3rd dimension and used for voxelization purposes this time around. This is an old feature which had two levels of hardware acceleration. Maxwell 2nd gen and GCN 1 and 1.1 has Level 2 Tiled Resources so it is backwards compatible. But with Maxwell, Level 2 Tiled Resources will be extended into the 3rd dimension and also can be used along with multi-projection (another Maxwell only hardware accelerated feature) for new opportunities like creating voxels (cubes) with only one side of it calculated/drawn (less calculations) and instancing the rest with the first side so it also requires less memory footprint.

Details about those features from GTX 980 whitepaper:

Multi-Projection and Tiled Resources

DirectX 11.2 introduced a feature called Tiled Resources that could be accelerated with an NVIDIA

Kepler and Maxwell hardware feature called Sparse Texture. With Tiled Resources, only the portions of

the textures required for rendering are stored in the GPU’s memory. Tiled Resources works by breaking

textures down into tiles (pages), and the application determines which tiles might be needed and loads

them into video memory. It is also possible to use the same texture tile in multiple textures without any

additional texture memory cost; this is referred to as aliasing. In the implementation of voxel grids,

aliasing can be used to avoid redundant storage of voxel data, saving significant amounts of memory.

One interesting application of Tiled Resources is multi resolution shadow maps. In the following Figure

13, the image on the left shows the result of determining shadow information from a fixed resolution

shadow map.

In the foreground, the shadow map resolution is not adequate, and blocky artifacts are

clearly visible. One solution would be to use a much higher resolution shadow map for the whole scene,

but this would be expensive in memory footprint and rendering time. Alternatively, with Tiled Resources

it is possible to render multiple copies of the shadow map at different resolutions, each populated only

where that level of resolution detail is needed based on the scene. In the image, each

resolution of shadow map is illustrated with a different color. The highest resolution shadow map (in

red) is only used in the foreground when that high resolution is required. This is another application of multi-projection that will benefit from the hardware acceleration in

Maxwell. In the future, we also believe that tiled resources can be leveraged within VXGI, to save voxel

memory footprint

3- Thirdly Raster Ordered View is about the order of rasterizations of objects using special interlocks placed in 2nd gen Maxwell shader units just like in ROPs so it is also hardware accelerated. It gives the developer control over the order that elements are rasterized in a scene, so that elements are drawn in the correct order in the first place all at once (previously it was drawn first and then sorted afterwards in an order for correct image - too slow). This feature specifically applies to Unordered Access Views (UAVs) being generated by pixel shaders, which by their very definition are initially unordered. ROVs offers an alternative to UAV's unordered nature, which would result in elements being rasterized simply in the order they were finished. For most rendering tasks unordered rasterization is fine (deeper elements would be occluded anyhow), but for a certain category of tasks having the ability to efficiently control the access order to a UAV is important to correctly render a scene quickly.

The textbook use case for ROVs is Order Independent Transparency, which allows for elements to be rendered in any order and still blended together correctly in the final result (in a fast fashion due to ROVs). Order Independent Transparency is not new – Direct3D 11 gave the API enough flexibility to accomplish this task – however these earlier OIT implementations would be very slow due to sorting, restricting their usefulness outside of CAD/CAM. The ROV implementation however could accomplish the same task much more quickly by getting the order correct from the start, as opposed to having to sort results after the fact. So now Order Independent Transparency is finally fast enough to use it in real time rendering in games.

Along these lines, since OIT is just a specialized case of a pixel blending operation, ROVs will also be usable for other tasks that require controlled pixel blending, including certain cases of anti-aliasing.

Details about those features from GTX 980 whitepaper:

Raster Ordered View

To ensure that rendering results are predictable, the DX API has always specified “in order” processing

rules for the raster pipeline, in particular the Color and Z units (“ROP”). Given two triangles sent to the

GPU in order—first triangle “A,” then “B”—that touch the same XY screen location, the GPU hardware

guarantees that triangle “A” will blend its color result before “B” blends it. Special interlock hardware in

the ROP is responsible for enforcing this ordering requirement.

DX11 introduced the capability for the pixel shader to bind “Unordered Access Views” of color and Z

buffers, and read and write arbitrary locations within those buffers. However as the name implies, there

is no processing order guarantee when multiple pixel shaders are accessing the same UAV.

The next generation DX API introduces the concept of a “Raster Ordered View,” which supports the

same guaranteed processing order that has traditionally been supported by Z and Color ROP units.

Specifically, given two shaders A and B, each associated with the same raster X and Y, hardware must

guarantee that shader A completes all of its accesses to the ROV before shader B makes an access.

To support Raster Ordered View, Maxwell adds a new interlock unit in the shader with similar

functionality to the unit in ROP. When shaders run with access to a ROV enabled, the interlock unit is responsible for tracking the XY of all active pixel shaders and blocking conflicting shaders from running

simultaneously.

One potential application for Raster Ordered View is order independent transparency rendering

algorithms, which handle the case of an application that is unable to pre-sort its transparent geometry

by instead having the pixel shader maintain a sorted list of transparent fragments per pixel.

4- Finally Typed UAV(Unordered Access View) Load is actually a newer and improved form of Unordered Access View that was first available in Feature Level 11_1. But this time around unpacking and then ordering of these unordered packets will be handled by the GPU instead of CPU which was previously the case. With 2nd gen Maxwell, NVIDIA has finally implemented the remaining features required for FL11_1 compatibility and beyond, updating their architecture to support the 16x raster coverage sampling required for Target Independent Rasterization and UAVOnlyRenderingForcedSampleCount. This extended feature set also extends to Direct3D 11.2, which although it doesn’t have an official feature level of its own, does introduce some new (and otherwise optional) features that are accessed via cap bits. Look at following image for UAV Slots, UAVs at Every Stage, UAV only rendering. And Tiled Resources Level 2.

Unordered Access Views (UAVs) are a special type of buffer that allows multiple GPU threads to access the same buffer simultaneously without generating memory conflicts. Because of this disorganized nature of UAVs, certain restrictions are in place that Typed UAV Load will address. As implied by the name, Typed UAV Load deals with cases where UAVs are data typed, and how to better handle their use. So in general any hardware that completely supports Feature Level 11_1 (all the optional bits included) will also be supporting Typed UAV Load!

Typed UAV Load goes ahead and attempts to address issues that are created (mostly restrictions) that’s currently in DX11. One of the downsides of UAV is that there are specific restrictions in place due to its unordered nature. Basically unpacking was handled on the software side, which means the job was put on the CPU to do it. Now the GPU will be able to accomplish the same thing without CPU intervention in Typed UAV Loads.

[mr moose]

Interesting, but may I ask where did you find this picture? First time seeing it.

 

It's kinda all over the net, I found it here:

 

http://forum.jogos.uol.com.br/lista-de-placas-com-suporte-ao-dx12-nvidia-deu-zinca-demais-aqui_t_3402386

 

That was back in march, However according to Microsoft only GCN2 will fully support DX12 while Maxwell already does. So I don't know what the real story is.

 

This was from back in January:

 

 

Note, Maxwell is actually the first GPU with full DX12 support, although DX12 graphics are currently only making appearances in demos.

 

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/198204-most-directx-12-features-wont-require-a-new-graphics-card

 

I guess a little bit of wait and see and well know for sure.  It could just be that that graph was put together before Maxwell was finalized.

[PotatoAlchemist]

The latest WHQL Windows 10 drivers does show that my GeForce GTX 970 is in fact on Direct3D feature level 12_1. Unless it's a mistake from NVidia Control Panel's System Information utility.

 

Dxdiag's feature level info is still stuck at 11.1 being the latest.

[Bouzoo]

The latest WHQL Windows 10 drivers does show that my GeForce GTX 970 is in fact on Direct3D feature level 12_1. Unless it's a mistake from NVidia Control Panel's System Information utility.

 

Dxdiag's feature level info is still stuck at 11.1 being the latest.

Well Win10 is not out yet, so no need for DX12 yet. Maybe next drivers (I'm quite sure of it if we're to believe latest Nvidia trend).

[gilang01]

all the 900 series have 12.1 support. why? they are all based on maxwell 2.0, an all use the same cuda architecture. the only difference is the amount of cores

[Zah]

all the 900 series have 12.1 support. why? they are all based on maxwell 2.0, an all use the same cuda architecture. the only difference is the amount of cores

My only thought would be different GPU cores, but that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense.