Microsoft on March 30 announced an update on their DirectX 12, more precisely on the Agility SDK which was released to developers to develop the two features they have provided in this update.
If these two features work well in later implementations, they might provide a significant increase in gaming performance in some cases. What's the update like this time, keep looking at the following article.
A recent DirectX 12 Agility SDK update enables simultaneous access to VRAM by the CPU and GPU.
As mentioned above, Microsoft introduced two new DX12 APIs to developers in Agility SDK version 1.710.0 (preview) which allows the CPU and GPU to access VRAM at the same time. The two features in question are called GPU upload heaps and Non-normalized sampling.
This update provides access to VRAM on the CPU and can be used simultaneously with the GPU. So that in practice the data that needs to be processed by the CPU no longer needs to go through various stages of the path which is expected to improve gaming performance.
With VRAM that has been managed by Windows , it eliminates the need to copy from CPU to GPU and can increase performance. The GPU upload heaps feature can work for both iGPU and dedicated GPUs , where if you use a dedicated graphics card, you have to turn on the Resizable BAR option via BIOS. Meanwhile, the iGPU does not require BIOS settings because this type of graphics card actually uses unified memory, aka sharing system memory.
Almost All Graphics Card Vendors Are Ready for Implementation
Microsoft also said that two of the three major graphics card vendors are actually ready to adopt this feature. From the NVIDIA vendor, the latest version of Game Ready Driver and Studio Driver (v531.41) is available for graphics cards with Ampere architecture and above. Meanwhile, Intel itself is available via Intel ARC Driver and Iris Xe Graphics Driver v31.0.101.4255. AMD vendors themselves need to contact the AMD alliance manager to get faster access to the latest DirectX 12 Agility API.
This feature is still very new and hasn't shown a real impact on gaming. Developers still have to try whether this feature really can produce improvements and is feasible to implement.