Are you an Nvidia or AMD fan? It may not matter as much as it used to, if this new rumor about DirectX 12 proves true.
Rumors have emerged that DirectX 12 will allow use of multiple GPUs by different manufacturers. The rumor was originally reported by Tom’s Hardware, and vouched for by a separate source for GameSpot.
As things currently stand, you can use two GeForce cards together via SLI, and two Radeon cards via Crossfire, but you can’t mix and match between the two brands. Apparently, DirectX 12 will bind multiple GPUs together, allowing them to treat the whole graphics subsystem as a single graphics card.
This setup brings other advantages to it as well. Your PC will be able to pool the memory of multiple GPUs, so that using 2GB GPUs will give you a total of 4 GB usable.
The rumor goes that DirectX 12 will also come with a related feature, that is very similar to Mantle, and may compel developers to optimize their games with both Mantle and DirectX 12 in mind. SFR, or Split Frame Rendering, will allow developers to divide texture and geometry data between GPUs, combine both GPUs to render each frame, and then allocate a portion of the screen to each GPU.
If you were thinking that it would be a pipe dream to make devs adopt this, you should know that Civilization Beyond Earth already uses this feature via Mantle.
If the rumor is true, it could explain why even older graphics cards showed an improvement in performance in Microsoft’s DirectX 12 demos.
Are you looking forward to DirectX 12 and Windows 10 now? Or are you still holding out to see how Windows 10 plays out? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.
