Stefan Mileschin

AMD has partnered up with IO Interactive and its upcoming Hitman game which will be the newest member of the AMD Gaming Evolved program and feature performance optimizations as well as unique DirectX 12 hardware features.

According to AMD, the upcoming Hitman game will leverage unique DirectX 12 hardware found only in AMD Radeon GPUs, asynchronous compute engines, which should handle heavier workloads and provide better image quality without compromising performance.

Basically, AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) GPUs can process multiple command streams in parallel which is enabled by so called Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACEs). Each queue can submit commands without waiting for other tasks to complete and some command streams can be interleaved on the GPU Shader Engines and execute simultaneously. AMD's GCN architecture has up to 8 ACEs per GPU which operate in parallel with graphics command processors and while these were not that important so far, beside Mantle API, ACEs will be quite important with DirectX 12.

Nvidia's Maxwell GPU architecture does not support Async Compute and has previously implemented via driver update as scheduling is done by software rather than hardware, something that AMD is quite keen to point out on several occasions.

It appears that the upcoming Hitman game, scheduled to launch on March 11th will be the first game to actually at least some of the features of the DirectX 12 API. According to AMD, Hitman will also feature support for ultrawide monitor and AMD's Eyefinity as well as super-sample anti-aliasing.

http://fudzilla.com/news/games/39949...ive-for-hitman