Am I misunderstanding what DX 12 does for CPUs?

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Fulano5321

Fulano5321

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Aug 10, 2015
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I've been seeing tons of people cheering that DX 12 is going to suddenly make single-thread programs into multi-thread programs.

My understanding is that DX 12 is just incredibly more efficient at sending instructions to the GPU, making the load on the CPU lighter.

I mean, if a CPU has to process instructions A, B, C, in order, there is no way to send instruction B to another core until instruction A is done.

Am I missing something? Or are lots of people still just misinformed?

I know that Windows already spreads instructions out to all the available cores, but the program still can't run faster than the slowest thread of instructions.


 
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k1114
Well there's the reduced overhead as explained but also other features that take advantage of more threads like async shaders and mutlithreaded command buffer. So future games would also be able to use more cores and it's then not misinformation.
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k1114

k1114

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You can't make single threaded software multithreaded. The software needs to be reprogrammed for that to happen. What you explained about ABC being in order is kinda what a single thread is which you can't split. What the hype is about is future software.
 
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turkey3_scratch

turkey3_scratch

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It's supposedly going to make the GPU do more work with less work from the CPU on the graphical side of things (i.e. less communication with the GPU, so less CPU utilization). I would expect everyone's GPUs to get hotter with DX12 games, and everyone's CPUs to get cooler.
 
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k1114

k1114

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May 2, 2010
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Well there's the reduced overhead as explained but also other features that take advantage of more threads like async shaders and mutlithreaded command buffer. So future games would also be able to use more cores and it's then not misinformation.
 
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Fulano5321

Fulano5321

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Aug 10, 2015
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Well that's a pretty cool thing, didn't see that in the reading I did but makes sense. Still I doubt such instructions will add more than a fraction of instructions to another core, but it's cool how it improves efficiency.

 
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