Oxide Confirms Async Compute Driver Support from NVIDIA

Oxide Games, developer of the highly-anticipated Ashes of the Singularity, has revealed that NVIDIA is working on a driver to fully implement DirectX 12’s Async Compute. According to Oxide developer Kollock, in a post on overclock.net, NVIDIA is in the process of refining its Async Compute driver, with the help of Oxide.

Kollock writes:

“We actually just chatted with Nvidia about Async Compute, indeed the driver hasn’t fully implemented it yet, but it appeared like it was. We are working closely with them as they fully implement Async Compute. We’ll keep everyone posted as we learn more.”

It seems as though NVIDIA will be implementing a combination of software and hardware to handle Async Compute, rather than by hardware alone.

Mahigan of Overclock offered this thorough explanation of Async Compute:

“The Asynchronous Warp Schedulers are in the hardware. Each SMM (which is a shader engine in GCN terms) holds four AWSs. Unlike GCN, the scheduling aspect is handled in software for Maxwell 2. In the driver there’s a Grid Management Queue which holds pending tasks and assigns the pending tasks to another piece of software which is the work distributor. The work distributor then assigns the tasks to available Asynchronous Warp Schedulers. It’s quite a few different “parts” working together. A software and a hardware component if you will.

With GCN the developer sends work to a particular queue (Graphic/Compute/Copy) and the driver just sends it to the Asynchronous Compute Engine (for Async compute) or Graphic Command Processor (Graphic tasks but can also handle compute), DMA Engines (Copy). The queues, for pending Async work, are held within the ACEs (8 deep each)… and ACEs handle assigning Async tasks to available compute units.

Simplified…

Maxwell 2: Queues in Software, work distributor in software (context switching), Asynchronous Warps in hardware, DMA Engines in hardware, CUDA cores in hardware.
GCN: Queues/Work distributor/Asynchronous Compute engines (ACEs/Graphic Command Processor) in hardware, Copy (DMA Engines) in hardware, CUs in hardware.”

Despite its own problems implementing DirectX 12, AMD already has a headstart when it comes to Async Compute. Now it seems that NVIDIA is hoping to close the gap very soon.

Thank you Dark Side of Gaming for providing us with this information.