Microsoft has just announced great news for PC gamers. The company recently released a new software development kit (SDK) named Agility SDK, which allows game developers to experience two new DirectX 12 features: GPU Upload Heaps and Non-normalized Sampling. These new features offer players a performance boost in their game, even on modest hardware configurations.
The first feature, GPU Upload Heaps, allows better use of the video memory of the graphics card, by allowing direct access from the processor (CPU) to the graphics card memory (VRAM), without the need to transfer data via the PCI bus. This means that CPUs and GPUs can access the same memory simultaneously, reducing latency and improving performance in certain situations.
The second feature is the Non-normalized Sampling, which allows game developers to create samplers with absolute coordinates, which helps to remove the limitations of the sampled texture dimension. Players can expect an improvement in texture quality (better sharpness).
Some explanations to popularize Non-normalized Sampling
In computer graphics, when a texture is applied to a 3D object, a method called “sampling” is used to recover the colors of the texture and apply them to the object. To do this, texture coordinates are used which range from 0 to 1, and which correspond to the dimensions of the texture. For example, if a texture is 512×512 pixels, the coordinate (0.5, 0.5) will correspond to the pixel located in the middle of the texture.
The “Non-normalized Sampling” feature allows this sampling method to be changed to use absolute texture coordinates, rather than normalized. This means that the coordinates will directly correspond to the pixels of the texture, rather than a fraction of the dimensions of the texture. For example, if a texture is 512×512 pixels, the coordinate (256, 256) will correspond directly to the pixel located in the middle of the texture.
This method can be useful in some cases, for example if you want to apply a texture to an object of variable size, or if you want to perform precise calculations on the pixels of a texture.
Both of these features are already available in developer preview, and are intended to be implemented in upcoming DirectX 12 games. For Nvidia GPU users, the latest Game Ready Drivers and NVIDIA Studio Drivers support GPU Upload Heaps and Non-normalized Sampling on all graphics cards.
Gamers can therefore expect a significant improvement in the graphics quality and performance of their PC games with these 2 new DirectX 12 features.
