AMD and Firaxis bringing DX12 to Civilization VI

Today AMD (NASDAQ: AMD), 2K and Firaxis Games announced a technical partnership to implement a truly exceptional DirectX® 12 renderer for Radeon™ GPUs into the graphics engine powering Sid Meier's Civilization® VI.

Complete with support for advanced DirectX® 12 features like asynchronous compute and explicit multi-adapter, PC gamers the world over will be treated to a high-performance and highly-parallelized game engine perfectly suited to sprawling civilizations designed to win hearts, minds, and the stars.

"Radeon™ graphics cards have rapidly become the definitive platform for next-generation DirectX® 12 content," said Roy Taylor, corporate vice president of alliances, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. "We're thrilled to bring our leading DirectX® 12 hardware and expertise to bear in the next installment of the Civilization franchise, which has long been adored by gamers for its intoxicating mix of beautiful graphics and hopelessly addictive gameplay."

"For 25 years the Civilization franchise has set the standard for beautiful and masterfully crafted turn based strategy," said Steve Meyer, Director of Software Development, Firaxis Games. "AMD has been a premiere contributor to that reputation in past Civilization titles, and we're excited to once again join forces to deliver a landmark experience in Sid Meier's Civilization® VI."

DirectX® 12 Asynchronous Compute
Asynchronous compute is a DirectX® 12 feature exclusively supported by the Graphics Core Next or Polaris architectures found in many AMD Radeon™ graphics cards. This powerful feature allows for parallel execution of compute and graphics tasks, substantially reducing the time other architectures need to execute the same workloads in a longer step-by-step manner. Asynchronous compute on many Radeon™ GPUs will perfectly complement the unit-rich late game of Civilization VI.

DirectX® 12 Explicit Multi-Adapter
Explicit multi-adapter represents the first time the DirectX® graphics API has officially supported multi-GPU configurations for gamers. Though past versions of the DirectX® API did not prevent multi-GPU support, there were no extensions that specifically aided its addition. DirectX® 12 explicit multi-adapter not only adds official Microsoft support, but augments that support with a range of powerful features and flexibility to unleash the imagination of a game developer. The benefit of multi-GPU can be legion: higher framerates, lower input latency, capacity for higher image quality and more. Explicit multi-adapter support will be an excellent feature addition for Radeon™ graphics customers who demand the very most from their Civilization VI experience.

A History of Collaboration
AMD, 2K and Firaxis Games have a history of intense technical collaboration for the good of PC gamers. Highlights include:

Adding DirectX® 11 support to Sid Meier's Civilization® V;

Co-development of Mantle, the world's first low-overhead PC graphics API;

Integration of the Mantle API into Sid Meier's Civilization® Beyond Earth™;

Development of the first modern split-frame rendering (SFR) multi-GPU implementation in Sid Meier's Civilization Beyond Earth

Coming This Fall
Sid Meier's Civilization® VI (not yet rated by the ESRB) is available for pre-order now on Windows PC, and will be released worldwide on October 21, 2016 for $59.99/£49.99/EUR 59.99 with DirectX® 12 and a built-in benchmark. Expand your empire further with the Civilization VI Digital Deluxe Edition, which includes the full base game, the 25th Anniversary Digital Soundtrack, and access to four post-launch DLC packs that will add new maps, scenarios, civilizations and leaders for a bundled discount.