With every new API being launched, developers of all sorts must update their libraries to include support. The same is true for Nvidia which has been limited to DX11 with their GameWorks SDK. This all changed today as Nvidia has announced that DX12 will now be coming to the GameWorks SDK as well. This developers who make use of GameWorks can integrate them with their DX12 titles as well.
To the performance improvements inherent in DX12, GameWorks is seeing a major uplift in performance. The big winner is simulation effects which Nvidia is claiming a doubling in performance. This is largely due to the adoption of Asynchronous Compute, and area that Nvidia has been notorious for not gaining much performance for. With this doubling of performance, it makes GameWorks more attractive as it won’t be as much of a performance hog anymore.
One of the major complaints leveled against GameWorks is that fact that competitor cards like AMD’s GCN GPUs often have gimped performance. Since AMD’s GPUs do so much better under GCN, it will be interesting to see the impact of the SDK moving to the new API for the read team. With more open sourcing of GameWorks, it will be interesting to see if AMD will be pushing commits to get more GCN optimizations baked in.
