Civilization VI Will Use DirectX 12 Features Like Asynchronous Compute and Explicit Multi-Adapter

[Guest_Jim_*]

Some of you may remember back when Civilization: Beyond Earth released that it supported Mantle, the low-level graphics API AMD developed, which helped push DirectX 12 to also be low-level and has since formed a base for the open Vulkan API. Now we know that AMD's partnership with 2K and Firaxis Games, the publisher and developer of the Civilization series, respectively, is continuing as Civilization VI will support DirectX 12 and some of its advanced features.

When the game launches on October 21, it will be able to use asynchronous compute and explicit multi-adapter to improve performance. Explicit multi-adapter allows the API to directly support multi-GPU configurations, instead of requiring the driver to handle it. This can potentially allow mismatched GPUs to work together, such as a discrete graphics card and the GPU built into many modern CPUs, as well as GPUs from both AMD and NVIDIA. Asynchronous compute is the feature that allows the different components inside of modern GPUs to act in parallel, instead of having to wait for operations to complete in sequence, despite the operations using separate resources. Currently AMD GPUs with their Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACEs) have shown themselves to be very capable of using asynchronous compute, so it is not surprising to see AMD supporting this feature in this upcoming, highly anticipated title.

Source: AMD

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