DirectX 12 Work Graphs Can Provide a Significant Performance Boost in Certain Scenarios, New Video Highlights

The new DirectX 12 Work Graphs feature can bring significant performance improvements in certain scenarios, judging from a recent video shared online this week.

The video, which was put together by Compusemble, takes a first look at the new feature, highlighting how it delivers similar performance most of the time, but can bring a significant performance boost in certain scenarios. As the feature is still new, and the current version is limited to compute shaders only, the performance boost isn't big on average, but the boost it does provide definitely bodes well for the future.

Related Story DirectX 12 Work Graphs Officially out, New GPU Autonomy System That Aims to Eliminate CPU Bottlenecks

The new DirectX 12 Work Graphs feature was officially launched earlier this week after being in preview for some time, and it could be a major game changer in the future, as highlighted by Remedy Entertainment in an interview with us from last year. You can learn more about this feature by checking out this post on Microsoft's DirectX Developer Blog.

Work Graphs are the natural next step in moving heavy graphics work from CPU to GPU, and we are eagerly waiting for GPU-based work submission to be adapted on all the platforms we target. Communication between CPU and GPU has been a major performance cost in real-time applications like games for a long time already, and we saw a large performance gain in Alan Wake 2 when moving more computation to happen fully on GPU. Having more fine-grained control on GPU scheduling ensures that all the available GPU power can be wisely used. Exposing something like this is very fundamental and can be used in many algorithms we run in Northlight.