AMD cancels primitive shaders driver support

[ivan134]

21 hours ago, Energycore said:

The problem wasn't the existence of Tessellation. It was that Nvidia cranked Tessellation levels to a point where there wasn't any visual improvement but there sure as hell was a lot more compute work needed (that Nvidia cards happened to do more easily). It doesn't show on Heaven, but it does show  in The Witcher 3 and other titles I can't recall right now.

Crysis 2. Tessellation on water underneath the map and behind walls

 

Whoops. @Sakkura beat me to it

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 hour ago, Doobeedoo said:

I take it if devs would see this fit for a certain game they would use it. It could be beneficial performance wise. Also more optimization but if it's worth it again, can be used. 

The funny thing is plenty of technology that was made popular by DX11 was already in either side's GPUs for years. For instance, everyone's favorite DX11 feature, tessellation, was around since the Radeon 8500 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_TruForm), though ATI axed it a generation or two later. Probably because nobody was using it.

[laminutederire]

 Is this decision part of the new strategy coming from the new guys over at RTG?

[Doobeedoo]

33 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

The funny thing is plenty of technology that was made popular by DX11 was already in either side's GPUs for years. For instance, everyone's favorite DX11 feature, tessellation, was around since the Radeon 8500 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_TruForm), though ATI axed it a generation or two later. Probably because nobody was using it.

Urm but primitive shaders seem different though, more like for potential performance benefit side. Like rapid packed math too no.

[Mira Yurizaki]

8 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

Urm but primitive shaders seem different though, more like for potential performance benefit side. Like rapid packed math too no.

Which is like adding a tessellation stage back in those days. It doesn't matter if there are performance benefits. If nobody's using it, it won't matter.

 

The only way to get a feature to widespread adoption is for the API to enforce it. DirectX 11 required that the GPU have hardware tessellation support and hence why it started popularizing. So unless DirectX 12.1 or Vulkan 2.0 or whatever requires primitive shaders, it's not really going to go anywhere.

[Doobeedoo]

32 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Which is like adding a tessellation stage back in those days. It doesn't matter if there are performance benefits. If nobody's using it, it won't matter.

 

The only way to get a feature to widespread adoption is for the API to enforce it. DirectX 11 required that the GPU have hardware tessellation support and hence why it started popularizing. So unless DirectX 12.1 or Vulkan 2.0 or whatever requires primitive shaders, it's not really going to go anywhere.

Right, so back to API with new feature support. Oh well, maybe we'll see it. 

[Agosto]

It's so sad Vega is such a failed and overhyped product. I mean, in productivity tests is much faster than Fiji, but in games it's just a die shrink of it.

 

Maybe RTG will fix these problems with Vega 20? It looks like a software problem though, not hardware. Navi is going to be a huge challenge too, imho.