Microsoft recently released the latest version of its Agility Software Development Kit (SDK) 1.613.0, which features Shader Model 6.8 and a new Work Graphs API. The latter is an important feature, as it allows the use of GPU-driver rendering and offloads the majority of tasks traditionally handled by the CPU.
“Work Graphs is a cutting-edge API that utilizes the full potential of your GPU. It’s not just an upgrade to the existing models, but a whole new paradigm that enables more efficient, flexible, and creative game development. With Work Graphs, you can generate and schedule GPU work on the fly, without relying on the host. This means you can achieve higher performance, lower latency, and greater scalability for your games with tasks such as culling, binning, chaining of compute work, and much more.”
To put it in laymen terms, Work Graphs basically gets both the GPU and CPU to work together more efficiently, with the former component taking on the role of the primary workhorse. Upon its release, NVIDIA also provided a more technical explanation of this.
“A work graph expresses this dependency implicitly by producer nodes passing records to children nodes. Children node shaders will only run when the producer has completed writing the record, implying that the data is fully ready for consumption by the child. Note that the scope of work graph producer-consumer dependencies are on the data record scope, whereas a resource barrier operates on all accesses to a resource.”
