Which PC games are using GPU Compute?

[futurefields]

Pardon my ignorance, I was reading about XBone and PS4 and GPU compute and so forth, and it got me wondering are there any PC games using GPU compute currently? If so which ones?

And if not yet, at what point will PC games begin using the power of GPU compute?

 

[imaheadcase]

I'm not sure what you mean by compute, but they do have apps that use GPU computing (folding, science stuff). But CPU does most of that for PCs for games, its not really needed for GPU for PC since CPU is plenty of fast.

Maybe i'm missing something with question. hehe

 

[BrightCandle]

I would argue any DX9 game and above is using compute. All that really means is that the game is using the GPUs stream processors to calculate something, typical uses of compute and pixel and vertex shader programs. Pretty much every game today uses lighting calculated on the stream processors of the GPU and not in the fixed function aspect of the GPU.

Even the xbox 360 and PS3 had GPU compute capabilities, it just wasn't possible to use them quite as easily as you can with a modern DX10 and up API. But you could do things like calculate mass parallel programs, you just had to render the results to textures whereas today we can input and output data directly from the GPU a lot more easily and in a more natural format (structs).

I actually think its somewhat a meaningless term because the previous generation of consoles technically had compute too, just much lower performance.

 

[Aikouka]

I don't think he's talking about things such as shaders since those directly affect the pixels, which the GPU is already working on. He's most likely talking about things like physics, which directly affect the logic that the CPU is working on.

 

[Jodell88]

I don't follow gaming like I used to but the latest Tomb Raider has GPU Compute for the hair called TressFX. Technically any game that uses Physx as well.

 

[BrightCandle]

I don't think he's talking about things such as shaders since those directly affect the pixels, which the GPU is already working on. He's most likely talking about things like physics, which directly affect the logic that the CPU is working on.

But that is a semantic difference. I can for example give the GPU a texture, run a pixel shader over it and that texture could really represent the physics of hair or a damage model on a car or whatever I want. Seti@home for example had a compute engine for GPUs that happily worked before we saw the current compute APIs, the only difference between a pixel shader and a so called compute call is that it doesn't have to be a 3D element, its a different API. But the exact same thing is happening inside of the GPU regardless of the format given to the card.

We have had compute for many years already and mostly people use it for visuals, a few games (like Rage and Tomb Raider) have used it for other things but even before the compute APIs games used it for other things beyond just image. The most common of which is the lighting model.

 

[Elixer]

I don't follow gaming like I used to but the latest Tomb Raider has GPU Compute for the hair called TressFX. Technically any game that uses Physx as well.

Not really, physx is CPU driven for anything but nvidia.
Not sure about TressFX, though, AMD does tend to be more open about these things.

 

[futurefields]

I had read XBone GPU has some compute units "locked down" for doing Compute functions. That 8 are for graphics and 4 are for compute. I dont even know what it means. That was what ignited my curiosity and made me create this thread.

 

[lamedude]

Civ5 and Rage for texture decompression, and Just Cause2 can use CUDA for water and blur.

 

[Aikouka]

I had read XBone GPU has some compute units "locked down" for doing Compute functions. That 8 are for graphics and 4 are for compute. I dont even know what it means. That was what ignited my curiosity and made me create this thread.

Locking down a third of your GPU's raw power doesn't make much sense from a performance perspective. Although, I could see it really being a limitation in the API. So, instead of them being locked down, the API will use 4 CUs at most for GPU compute.