Yes, there is a major feature called asynchronous shading. Fortunately for AMD customers, it's a DX12 feature that only GCN hardware supports. It allows a graphics card to run compute and graphics workloads simultaneously, which is a first for DirectX.
Radeon GPUs have three independent queues for useful work: graphics, memory and compute. In DX11, this hardware must be accessed serially. In other words, I can only do work on one of these queues at a time, even if the jobs don't relate to one another and could run independently. One of DX12's big changes is that these jobs can run independently. Now I can render what the user is seeing right now right alongside computing the setup for the next thing the user sees.
A math example:
- Rendering a hypothetical 3D scene takes 8 milliseconds.
- Computing the setup for the next frame takes 1.5 milliseconds.
- Processed serially, it would take 9.5 milliseconds to finish churning through the data to reach the next scene.
- But now I can process setup and 3D at the same time, so now I only have to wait on the longest job: 8ms for the 3D scene. The setup has already been completed in parallel when the next scene has started.
That's a render speedup of 15%. That's a lot. That's 15% higher framerates in our hypothetical example.
Games are using compute and graphics all the time. Most shadowing, lighting, camera lens and physics effects are compute. Saving time there makes 3D geometry rendering faster, it makes framerates higher and it makes VR or input latency lower.
Good all around. This is a huge feature for DX12, and developers are extremely familiar with it as it's been accessible in the console space for quite some time. They've been clamoring to bring the same kind of performance gains on PCs.
