Direct3D 11.3 (and nVidia’s Maxwell Mark 2)

A few days ago, nVidia introduced the new GTX970 and GTX980, based on the Maxwell architecture. A bit of a surprise however, is that this is a ‘Mark 2’ version of the Maxwell architecture, which has some new features that the original Maxwell in the GTX750 series did not have. Related to that surprise was another surprise, namely that these features will also be supported in Direct3D 11.3, not just Direct3D 12. It appears that Microsoft wants to support Direct3D 11.3 and Direct3D 12 side-by-side, at least for the short term. The new features include conservative rasterization, which was already mentioned earlier, with the presentation of Direct3D 12. Also, rasterizer ordered views, which were also mentioned before, which make efficient order-independent translucency possible, for example. Typed UAV loads are also new, which have not been mentioned before as far as I know. And finally, tiled resources are now expanded from 2d to 3d volume textures. These new features (along with nVidia’s new multiple-projection acceleration) allow for more efficient voxel-based rendering, especially interesting for efficient global illumination. This is something that nVidia is promoting heavily with their new cards, something they call Voxel accelerated Global Illumination (VXGI). It will be interesting to see how this will be implemented in actual games. It could be another big step up in realistic lighting. At any rate, this shows once again that the claims made by the pro-Mantle crowd are certainly not true: we most definitely have not reached the end of development as far as rendering methods are concerned. APIs and GPUs are still being updated to support new ways of rasterizing, as I already said before. As I said: if AMD does not see it that way, that could just mean a lack of vision on their behalf. nVidia has once again shown that they are committed to pushing graphics technology ever further, by once again being the first to introduce new features. We will have to see when and how AMD will respond. When will they introduce their next architecture? And will it include features such as conservative rasterizing (volume tiled resources should already be supported by GCN, although for some reason D3D11.2 only received support for 2d textures)? Even moreso: can AMD also improve the efficiency as much as nVidia has? Because another interesting feature of Maxwell is that despite the larger transistor count, and still being 28 nm, it is significantly less powerhungry than Kepler.