NVIDIA announces RTX IO, GPU to Directly Access SSD
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schmidtbag
pharma
DirectStorage is coming to PC
Sept 1, 2020
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-coming-to-pc/
Denial
tsunami231
so this gona be asnwer to console ps5/xbox faster loading? is this all built into the drivers and windows or "Extra" software that need to be installed? like say "drivex"
and seeing it involves dx12 do i need newer version of windows still on 1907 here and is this gona be universal thing? meaning old game will support this? or is the game gona have to be patch to support this seeing is involves dx 12, what about DX9/10/11 games yes games are still using DX9 to this day, 10 to lesser degree, DX11 more the the other 2 fast as I can tell.
Denial
richto
user1
https://www.custompcreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/amd-vega-ces-2017-press-deck_Page_36.jpg
[/spoiler]
its not the same as RTX io/directstorage. though maybe amd can implement support for Directstorage in the same or similar way.
The HBCC can pull directly from any storage device according to some early slides, it specifically can use any storage as a cache (including things like network storage), , the HBCC is aware of different available memory pools and uses a tiered storage like solution presented as vram, the whitepaper doesn't detail using anything other than nvram or ram, so maybe it was cancelled or subject to some erratum.
[spoiler]
Denial
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/7x552w/exploring_vega_hbcc_and_its_effect_on_the_system/
This post does a good job investigating the effects of HBCC on the CPU.
_
GPUDirect Storage on the other hand allows the DMA on the NVMe drive to push the request data directly into the GPU's memory, bypassing both system memory, the CPU and the GPU's DMA engine entirely.
I think this section from Nvidia explains it pretty well:
The technologies are similar in that they both work to provide data to the GPU but the similarities kind of end there. HBCC creates a tiered VRAM/SDRAM cache and simply requests data the traditional way, but intelligently manages this cache. GPU Direct Storage allows the data on, what I think is any device with a DMA engine, to directly write to GPU's storage.
HBCC creates what AMD calls a HBC (High Bandwidth Cache) which resides in both VRAM/SDRAM in a tiered hierarchy, with VRAM as the last level cache. If the GPU requires an asset that's outside of this cache, the controller can request the CPU to fetch it and pull it within the HBC, than the GPU can utilize it.
So while it can request data from any location, the data is moved into the HBC first and it's all done by the CPU. It's really not that much different than how GPUs worked prior to HBCC, but HBCC creates storage tiers and manages pages/swaps/etc for the developer.
sykozis
user1
https://pics.computerbase.de/7/9/3/5/2/1-630.3959041560.png [/spoiler]
so the question remains whether the inclusion of the cpu block in this diagram for accessing "storage", is due to no apis/os support , or a hard limitation.
thing is that accessing system memory in anyway requires using the cpu, its not really useful to show that turning on hbcc uses more cpu energy/sycles since fundamentally there is no other way to access that memory, the fact that the SSG variant has its own ssd it can read from via pcie, is managed by the HBCC, and the slides show network access , pcie ,xdma ect, strongly suggests that it is doesn't have to talk to the cpu inorder to use storage as a cache. kinda like how amd used to use xdma engines for crossfire over the pcie bus without cpu involvement.
also found this slide from the SSG press release
[spoiler]
wavetrex
Don't forget that GPU is physically connected to the CPU... the 16 lanes come from the CPU's I/O area (internal North Bridge), and in case of Zen 2, it's a dedicated die.
Even if the GPU accesses the SSD -directly-, without involving the CPU cores, it will still happen through the CPU I/O (but not through execution of CPU code)
Monolyth
This is a pretty big game changer regardless of who got there first. It may not be as sexy as ray tracing to demo but this kind of tech will be the unsung hero as textures get ever larger over the foreseeable future.
And I agree that we will probably see it sooner than we expect. These kinds of low level features and enhancements can be added without necessarily altering core storage access APIs.
NewTRUMP Order
Excuse my ignorance on the subject but can someone tell me how much of a difference it makes from the other way of going thru the cpu? Seconds, miliseconds, can / can't tell the difference while gaming? Will it give you an edge over someone online using the cpu method? Is this a game changer, pardon the pun, or who cares?
Mufflore
Fox2232
mbk1969
So how many people in the world have NVMe disks in their rigs? 100%?
Astyanax
Astyanax
GPUDirect Storage is not RTX IO,
RTX IO is derived from it to a degree but where as GPDS is a full stack nvidia implementation, RTX IO cuts out the front end and replaces it with MSDS API.
Caesar
Astyanax