AMD: Vega will not get Primitive Shader driver support

Posted on Tuesday, January 23 2018 @ 17:13 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
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Primitive shaders were one of the supposed killer features of AMD's Vega architecture, this new shader promised performance gains by automatically discarding the calculation of unnecessary and hidden geometries. Anyway, that's no longer relevant today as AMD has officially cancelled this long-delayed feature. This news was communicated by AMD to certain members of the press at a CES 2018 event.

There's no word about the rationale behind this decision. AMD still plans to offer an explicit API path to code primitive shaders, but without an implicit driver path this means a lot more effort is required from game developers (aka dead on arrival).
The move was revealed by Golem.de editor Marc Sauter, commenting as "y33H@" on 3DCenter.org forums. In layman's terms, AMD at its Vega graphics architecture reveal, promised a driver that would sense where primitive shaders would benefit unoptimized games and automatically develop primitive shaders for them. That plan has been scrapped. What AMD is now offering is an API so developers can make primitive shaders on their own dime.
Before the launch of Vega, former AMD RTG head Raja Koduri promised programmers wouldn't need to do anything special to take advantage of the improvements in Vega. Koduri is now working at Intel, to enhance the chip giant's future GPUs.

Vega Primitive Shaders Canned

Via: TPU


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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