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AMD/ATI improving GCN even more with Shader Intrinsic Functions

AMD brings yet another addition to their GPUOpen initiative. The new adition is called Shader Intrinsic Functions and it brings something very interesting which could potentionally give AMD big advantage if developers decide to use it.



Shader Intrinsic Functions could bring console-like optimizations to PC

This addition ironically comes from current generation consoles powered by the GCN architecture. In those consoles, developers have direct access to its hardware so that they can more directly call the hardware instructions they need without anything in-between. This gives consoles a big advantage when it comes to optimisations, because with this advantage developers can more easily access the base hardware and optimise for it which is still not necessarily possible on PC, even with DX11, DX12 or Vulkan and then through the GPU compiler itself. AMD is now bringing the same advantage to their GCN GPUs as an extension to existing APIs including DX11, DX12 and Vulkan. With Shader Intrinsic Functions you can directly access graphics instructions and you don’t have to rely on the API or even the GPU compiler.

All this looks great on paper, and seems to have big potential, but will it translate into real-world improvements?

This is very hard to answer, but we can look at other similar technologies as a reference to how those technologies can make it into the real-world. Let’s take Asynchronous Compute as an example or even DX12 itself.

These two technologies show great potential but so far the real-world gains were a bit disappointing. First of all most of current DX12 titles were somewhat broken on their launch with the exception of Ashes Of The Singularity. The performance was not great either regarding DX12 titles but this can be the learning curve of a new API considering DX12 is relatively new and DX11 had similar rough launch.

Now what about Asynchronous Compute? This technology is supported on all GCN powered GPUs while, as of right now, it may be supported by Nvidia’s newest Pascal architecture. It is currently used in two games on PC. Ashes Of The Singularity and the new Hitman. In those games the performance improvement from this technology is not very big. Reports say it varies between 5-15% more performance on average. But I’d say this gain, while that might seem low, is actually reasonable considering it is basically a free performance boost for GPUs that support it.

It all depends on developers for the actual improvement

So what is the conclusion? At this moment the technology definitely seems interesting, sadly we will have to wait and see if developers will take advantage of it and what performance improvements will it bring if any. Asynchronous Compute is great example of this. The technology is good but AMD had to push it very hard to get it actually used by developers.

For those who want to check out Shader Intrinsic Functions click here for the GPUOpen post about this new addition.

Their video summarizing Shader Intrinsic Functions and what they can do can be found right here.

 

The AMD Webinar Sneak Peak was today, and we’ve got the details on Polaris

Today there was an AMD webinar and “Meet the Experts“ event for partners about their new upcoming Polaris architecture that was hosted by their Community Manager Carolina Castano and Senior Technology Manager David Nalasco for their partners. AMD was kind enough to open this particular webinar to public. Unfortunately the AMD webinar didn’t bring with it any surprises that some had been hoping for. As the AMD community manager said in the beginning, this was NOT a launch effort. It was a summary of Polaris architecture for partners before launch which should happening in the coming months.

However, despite that, we were able to get some new bits of information from their Q&A section at the end of the webinar.

AMD Webinar Polaris Sneak Peak; “Meet the Experts”

First bit is the actual number GPUs AMD is preparing. There will be 2 GPUs. One smaller called Polaris 11 and a second bigger one which is called Polaris 10, as we mentioned before. Those two GPUs will have surely have their cut down versions and will have a wide range of different board designs as well as separate mobile versions, which AMD pointed out in the webinar. From reference designs to various AIB designs. AMD noted that we will see these reference and AIB designs in coming weeks and months.

AMD also pointed out one of their key features in their Polaris architecture which is Asynchronous Compute. This feature, also found in previous GCN based AMD GPUs, will help to improve performance in future DX12/Vulkan titles and AMD is very keen on pushing this feature into upcoming titles and they stated they will drive it even more aggressively than before. Interesting stuff.

Another bit AMD mentioned in Q&A section is that all Polaris based GPUs will share the same multimedia capabilities. Features specifically mentioned were 10-bit decode and hardware accelerated H.265.

AMD didn’t say much about performance but they specified that they were able do get to get more performance out of each transistor not only thanks to 14nm FinFET process but also by virtue of the various optimizations within the Polaris architecture itself.

Now probably the most interesting part of the whole QA session. We asked them if the efficiency improvements that AMD specified in their previous presentations are uniform for all GPUs AMD will offer or if it’s just for the most efficient GPU of the whole family. We were lucky enough to get my question answered with a little tiny bit of extra unexpected spice. AMD answered that there will be wide range of different board designs which means some will have different clocks than others. This means that some will be more efficient than others but generally the capability and improvements will be there.

Another interesting part about this answer was when AMD mentioned AIB partners and that some of them will most likely try to drive the clocks as high as possible with their own designs, which would mean lower efficiency. Which is quite interesting indeed. It means that AMD is not limiting AIB partners with clockspeeds for the sake of better efficiency and this should be great news for those who want the best possible performance.

 

Underland is a New Map for Unreal Tournament Free !

Underland is a Deathmatch level designed for 6 to 8 people. Players fight across a hidden outpost, once lost for a thousand years, that guards the entrance to the massive Underland caverns. Download the new UT here at http://unrealtournament.com it's free!

Unreal Tournament Underland Trailer

 

Personally speaking, if UT had the marketing money that Overwatch did, UT would win...

 

It's a Great Game IMO.
It Has the Old Spirit

 

SpellForce 3 will be PC exclusive & will be playable at this year’s E3 !

Nordic Games announced today that SpellForce 3 is scheduled for a 2016 release on the PC. SpellForce 3 will be playable at this year’s E3, and is described as a perfect blend of real-time strategy and role-playing game.

SpellForce 3 promises to combine the best of the two genres in the renowned SpellForce universe with a rich, deep backstory. The action takes place prior to the events of SpellForce: The Order of Dawn, and this “prequel” immerses players in the lush and luxuriant fantasy world of Eo.

Similar to its predecessors, players create their hero from scratch and can then develop the hero’s skills during the campaign, complete quests, explore the game world and join forces with up to three characters to form a group of heroes.

According to the press release, the map in SpellForce 3 is divided into different sectors.

“The player’s base will always grow organically, not arbitrarily. This means that the player can only conquer sectors, which are connected to the base or other, already conquered, sectors. This is important, because there is no “Global Economy”, but the distribution of resources will happen mechanically (resources are being transported via carts). The player can decide which raw materials they want to collect, distribute and export in each sector and must therefore carefully plan where to build the sectors.”

Here are the key features of SpellForce 3:

# RTS/RPG Mix: Unique gameplay combining RTS and Top-Down RPG genres
--> RTS: the RTS part focuses on macromanagement (overall strategy, building a base/economy, conquering of zones, managing large groups of units)
--> RPG: the RPG part puts emphasis on micromanaging the party of heroes (skills of ALL heroes of the party have assigned keyboard bindings) in battles
# Create & Customize: assemble your party of heroes and choose between numerous combinations of different skill builds
# Strengthen and command your army: Prepare your troops and f ight the mother of all battles. Moreover, players can utilize a wide array of strategic choices (like e.g. terrain, troop formations, visibility, scouting etc.) that would make Sun Tzu proud
# Epic Storyline: Unravel a deep and sophisticated story, eventually leading up to the events that cause the world-changing convocation ritual
# Rich Universe & :Lore: Explore the world Eo and discover intrigues, secrets and a lot of loot for your hero
# Extensive Single-Player Campaign: 30+ hours, even more when you manage to discover all the things Grimlore put in the world
# Multiplayer: Strong multiplayer component with various modes – Play cooperatively or in versus battles

Spellforce 3 - Gameplay

 

Thanx for the heads up.
Its a beautiful map

 

HITMAN Episode 3: Marrakesh is coming on May 31st

Io-Interactive announced today that the launch date for HITMAN Episode 3: Marrakesh will be on May 31st. The mission titled: ‘A Gilded Cage’ enlists Agent 47 to take out two targets, private investment banker Claus Strandberg and Army General Reza Zaydan.

HITMAN Episode 3: Marrakesh will present players with a range of new in-game Challenges and Opportunities that will keep them busy along with an entirely new setting for Escalation Contracts and Elusive Targets.

More Here -> hitman.com

Here some screenies -> www.flickr.com/photos/playstationblogeurope

 

GPUOpen: Shader Intrinsic Functions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7RSszCPt68

GCN Shader Extensions for Direct3D and Vulkan

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Matthaeus Chajdas

***62953; barycentric, DirectX 12, DX12, extension, intrinsic, shader, Vulkan


The GCN architecture contains a lot of functionality in the shader cores which is not currently exposed in current APIs like Vulkan™ or Direct3D® 12. One of the mandates of GPUOpen is to give developers better access to the hardware, and today we’re releasing extensions for these APIs to expose additional GCN features to developers.

Shader Extensions

With those shader extensions, we provide access to wavefront-wide functions, which is an important building block to exploit the SIMD execution model of GPUs. For instance, the use of mbcnt and ballot can replace atomics in various cases, drastically boosting performance. The wavefront-wide instructions also include swizzles, which allow individual lanes to exchange data without going through memory.

Additionally, we expose readfirstlane and other functions which enable the compiler to move data from VGPRs into SGPRs. Especially for VGPR heavy code, marking variables as wavefront-uniform can reduce the VGPR count significantly.

Another often-requested feature which is getting exposed today is direct access to the barycentric coordinates. This is again an important building block for various algorithms.

Finally, we also provide various utility functions. In this release, we’re providing the 3-parameter min, max and med functions which map directly to the corresponding GCN opcodes.

Direct3D Access

In Direct3D, the shader extensions are exposed through the AMD GPU Services (AGS) library. For more information on AGS, visit GPUOpen’s AGS page.

The extension allows you to query the presence of the various extension functions. The functions have to be enabled before you can load a shader that uses them – this guarantees that your shader is compatible with the underlying hardware.

In your code, all you need to do is include amd_ags.h in your c/cpp file, initialize AGS with agsInit, and then check for shader extension support as shown in the code below:

http://gpuopen.com/gcn-shader-extensions-for-direct3d-and-vulkan/

:banana::banana::banana:

 

there is some crazy stuff in the gpuopen page...

 

THX :thumbup:

 

Lets hope the developers use all that, or some of that so we can benefit.

 

Awesome. But AMD took their sweet time with this also

 

Devs can untap new Power from GCN based GPU's (Yes it is for GCN)
But Devs can also untap some New Powers from nV based GPU's as well (its GPU Open).
:book:

The whole GPU Open thing is a Great Endeavour by AMD/ATI
But it needs good coders also !

-> Dice, CryTek, IO + Square Enix & some UE4 Devs are already interested with this stuff :nerd:

 

they are low level/close to metal functions that any vendor can adapt to their own hardware as all the source is open.

 

Yes this specific Code is for GCN GPU's Only

But it just shows a new ways for Close to Metal functions, and maby in time will be adopted in some form into GeForce :nerd:

 

Here, read this one :grad:

Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD) at 44th Annual JPMorgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference (Transcript)

"
Harlan Sur

And I know that your competitor just released their Pascal platform. As you look at the early specs and the early benchmarks, what's your feel in terms of the Polaris architecture relative to their Pascal architecture?

Mark Papermaster

Well, you look at what we've done with Polaris, right, and it's leveraging on that, as I said a moment ago, that Graphics Core Next. So first and foremost, both companies are going to leverage FinFET. But when you look at Pascal, it's largely just that. From our assessment, it's a technology map. What you'll see AMD do is drive, as I said a moment ago, both design and process. So you're going to see a generational performance provide advantage from both aspects.
(my Note -> As i said earlier it will pack 2.5x + up to 37% Performance per W [IMO])

And actually, I didn't comment on DX12. I want to go back to DX12 a little bit, because there's also a difference when you look at AMD versus our competition. So what is DX12 doing? We applaud what Microsoft has done there, because what they've done is enabled programmers, application developers, game developers, specifically, to get what we call closer to the metal. And by that we mean eliminate intervening levels of software. Well, that's fantastic, because that really unleashes the power of the graphics processor.

And we've been at this on Graphics Core Next architecture since 2013, when we released Mantle, which does a very similar approach. And so with DX12, we're very tuned in to how to optimize and unlock our performance. We've done very rapid releases of our enablement, our drivers. And so what you're seen is competitive advantages that we have versus our competitor in DX12 games. So as games are coming out, and it says optimize your DX12, watch the benchmarks, read the press release of our competitive positioning, it's extremely strong."

As you can read between words there ;-) there will be no VEGA this year !
VEGA will be Ultra-Enthusiast level GPU with HBM_2 :infinity:
As i have my own source, that clearly point me into right direction when comes to Polaris GCN's -> Enthusiast level is also comming this summer and Yes GDDR5x is a no go ! Why? Becouse AMD/ATI has it's own solution - HBM High Bandwith Memory with even lower latency with Polaris.
And that is something im awere of -> The Big Polaris will be enough until Vega came in Q4 2017? maby later, Summer 2018. Who knows. :nerd:

 

New Info Hits my Mind

99% Confirmed that New BF1 will be DX12 (Yes Full DX12 Game, not DX11_3 like present ones)
That also confirms my Source -> Polaris will Have Full DX12 H/W Support :banana: