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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If DirectML is just DX12 API based, any DX12 capable cards would be compatible one would assume.
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The quality of the image is based on a bunch of factors that are constantly improving. Look at neural net imaging from 5 years ago to today, it's night and day.
Given Nvidia's market saturation and the time it will take AMD to pull together a GPU Open variant of DLSS on DirectML (Then train a few games and integrate it) Turing will most likely have shipped more cards then AMD with Vega.
Capable yes but the performance is kind of an unknown. Microsoft showed a 275x improvement over CPU on a Titan V on Tensor cores. Vega won't nearly get that much performance and Pascal doesn't packed FP16 so the performance will be even worse - if it's even worth doing at that point. Microsoft basically said under a certain point and you can't do it in real time reliably.
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It's what was stated by MS during DirectML announcement. There's also no reason why Vega or any other cards would get any performance boost from DirectML.
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Maybe I'm an idiot, but DirectML doesn't seem like some Tensor AMD response. Tensor cores are at their heart interesting for DLSS because the processing is done separately, and the idea is there is little/no performance impact as the Cuda cores continue to focus on the game.
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Plus, how many Turings are out there? there are much more Pascal GPU's on the market (Bought new by gamers or 2nd hand ex-mining cards) so Pascal gamers wil left in the dark while New turing cards will enjoy the DirectML era, vs AMD's Vega GPU's that will get Free performance boost over 1080Ti.