DirectX 12 Async Compute Still As Important As Ever – Can Nvidia Catch Up To AMD?
One of the more important architectural changes that Nvidia has introduced with pascal is the addition of a hardware scheduler, similar to what AMD did with the GCN architecture in 2011 starting with the HD 7000 series.
This new hardware scheduler will play a crucial role in allowing Pascal GPUs to perform better at executing tasks asynchronously, even though it still evidently relies on pre-emption and context switching according to what Nvidia has revealed in its
Pascal whitepaper.
So while this scheduler doesn’t actually allow tasks to be executed asynchronously it will still improve the performance of Pascal GPUs when it comes to executing code that’s written asynchronously. It’s sort of a hack to hold Pascal off until proper async compute is implemented in Nvidia’s future architectures.