According to a fresh rumor, upcoming Microsoft DirectX 12 API might have a rather neat feature and allow multi-GPU setups between Nvidia Geforce and AMD Radeon GPUs.

While we certainly doubt that either Nvidia or AMD would allow such a thing and with various performance optimization problems, Tom's Hardware has published an exclusive report, citing a "source with knowledge on the matter of DirectX 12" that the new API will be able to combine Nvidia Geforce and AMD Radeon GPUs for a mixed multi-GPU setup.

According to the report, Microsoft's DirectX 12 API has Explicit Asynchronous Multi-GPU capabilities, which allows it to combine various graphics resources into one place while game developers can decide how this resources will be split for specific tasks. This goes well in line with previous reports that DirectX 12 will be able to combine VRAM. Since the new multi-GPU technology and API will no longer have to mirror frame buffers, and stick to two GPUs that have identical amount of VRAM in order for Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) to work and use the new Split Frame Rendering, there is no more such limitations.

The report suggest that DirectX 12 will support all these features "across multiple GPU architectures, simultaneously," which suggest that you might be able to combine Nvidia Geforce and AMD Radeon graphics cards while developers will have to focus on how to pull the best from each GPU, like G-Sync, PhysX, 3D Vision, TrueAudio, Freesync, or any other feature from one or the other GPU maker.

This will also have a great impact on notebook graphics and how and APU or CPU with integrated graphics can be combined with a discrete GPU, something that both AMD and Nvidia have been playing around for quite some time.

In any case, Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2015 is just around the corner and hopefully we will hear more about DirectX 12 and see if these neat new features are a real possibility.



Source: Tweaktown.com.