AMD Could Do DLSS Alternative with Radeon VII through DirectML API
There is an interesting development, as you know the GeForce RTX graphics cards have tensor cores, dedicated cores for optimizing and accelerating anything AI and Deep Learning. A spawn from that technology for gaming is DLSS, which NVIDIA is marketing strongly. With the October 2018 update for Windows 10, Microsoft has released the DirectML API for DirectX 12.
ML stands for Machine Learning - and makes it possible to run trained neural networks on any DX12 graphics card. Basically, the Deep Learning optimization or algorithm if you will, becomes a shader that can be run over the traditional shader engine, without a need for tensor cores. In an interview with AMD they mention that the team is working on this and it seems, Radeon VII seems very well suited for the new API. Japanese website 4gamer.net spoke with AMD marketing manager Adam Kozak, AMD is currently testing DirectML with Radeon VII and was positively impressed by the results, and that is exciting news for AMD offering them an AI/DL alternative.
While AMD is testing this on Radeon VII, logic obviously dictates that it would work well on Radeon RX Vega 64 and Radeon RX Vega 56 as well. This allows, for example, an alternative implementation to Nvidia's DLSS.
Only 1+1=2
Of course, should this become an actual supported thing, then it can't be addressed AMD alone, this question remains: will game developers actually implement, experiment and integrate support for DX ML into games?
It also has to be said, it works reversed, DirectML could also make use of Nvidia's Tensor cores, certainly giving them an advantage. As the Radeon card would see a performance hit, whereas the RTX cards can simply offload the algorithm towards its Tensor cores. Time will tell, but this certainly is an interesting development as long as your graphics card is powerful enough, of course.
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Senior Member
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Joined: 2012-07-20
That's marketing. I look at results. You should too. Maybe next generation on 7nm will be better, but for now it is not much of an visual difference at too high of a frame time cost.
Senior Member
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Joined: 2007-04-17
It's certainly possible to use RT h/w in Turing to get performance boost for some effects without or with minor improvement to image quality. RT can be used for a lot of things. There's no inherent frame time cost.
Senior Member
Posts: 3483
Joined: 2007-04-17
RT cores don't provide general purpose compute power, sure, but they do accelerate one specific step in RT computations - BVH traversal - which frees up available compute capacity for shading. Which in turn makes limited usage of real time RT somewhat possible even on mid-class consumer videocards.