AMD Details Asynchronous

[Snederevac1]

AMD has been working closely with Microsoft on the upcoming DirectX 12 API, and it likes to show off once in a while how well its graphics cards will support some of those features. For example, there are the so-called "Asynchronous Shaders," which are a different way of handling task queues than was possible in older graphics APIs and is potentially much more efficient.

 

In DirectX 11, there are two primary ways of synchronous task scheduling: multi-threaded graphics and multi-threaded graphics with pre-emption and prioritization, each with their advantages and disadvantages.

 

Before we continue, we must clarify a couple of terms. The GPU's shaders do the drawing of the image, computing of the game physics, post-processing and more, and they do this by being assigned various tasks. These tasks are delivered through the command stream, which is the main command queue of tasks that the shaders need to execute. The command stream is generated through merging individual command queues, which consist of multiple tasks and break spaces.