DirectX 12 API Gets New GPU Upload Heaps & Non-Normalized Sampling Features In Agility SDK
Microsoft today announced the addition of two new DirectX 12 API features called GPU upload heaps & Non-Normalized sampling in the latest Agility SDK preview.
In its latest blog post, Microsoft's DirectX Developer Blog has posted the availability of the Agility SDK 1.710.0 (preview) which adds brand new features to the DirectX 12 API. The two new feature updates include GPU Upload Heaps and Non-normalized sampling. Following is the description of the two new features from the blog itself:
GPU Upload Heaps
Introduction
Historically a GPU’s VRAM was inaccessible to the CPU, forcing programs to have to copy large amounts of data to the GPU via the PCI bus. Most modern GPUs have introduced VRAM resizable base address register (BAR) enabling Windows to manage the GPU VRAM in WDDM 2.0 or later.
With the VRAM being managed by Windows, D3D now exposes the heap memory access directly to the CPU! This allows both the CPU and GPU to directly access the memory simultaneously, removing the need to copy data from the CPU to the GPU increasing performance in certain scenarios.
GPU upload heaps can be used on both iGPUs and dGPUs. For dGPUs, the resizable bar needs to be turned on in BIOS. iGPUs do not have this requirement, since GPU upload heaps are going to use L0 memory for UMA.
Non-normalized Sampling
With this Agility SDK on supported hardware, a new sampler flag is available to create a sampler that interprets sampling coordinates as absolute.
Preview PIX Support on Day 1
PIX has support for both GPU Upload Heaps and Non-normalized sampling in its latest preview release, version 2303.30-preview to accompany today’s Agility SDK release. See here for more information.
Microsoft has also revealed the readiness of
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