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Windows 8 and WDDM 1.2

Magic Carpet

Magic Carpet

Diamond Member
Thoughts and / or experience?

At WinHEC 2006, Microsoft talked about how it was planning a major change to WDDM to allow for better multitasking on GPUs. According to Microsoft, WDDM 1.0 only allows rudimentary task scheduling with rendering "batch queue" granularity. WDDM 2.0 and WDDM 2.1, which at that time were expected post-Vista[21] but on which Microsoft had not put an introduction date, would offer fine grain preemptive multitasking and would require a new generation of GPUs.[22][23] Since these features are present in WDDM 1.2, it seems likely that Microsoft elected to use a different version number for the same update.
Windows 8 includes WDDM 1.2[24][25] and DXGI 1.2.[26][25] New features were first previewed at the Windows BUILD conference and include performance improvements as well as support for stereoscopic 3D rendering and video playback.
Other major features include finer preemptive multitasking granularity (DMA buffer, primitive, triangle, pixel, or instruction-level),[27] reduced memory footprint, improved resource sharing, and faster timeout detection and recovery. 16-bit color surface formats (565, 5551, 4444) are mandatory in Windows 8, and Direct3D 11 Video supports YUV 4:4:4/4:2:2/4:2:0/4:1:1 video formats with 8, 10, and 16-bit precision, as well as 4 and 8-bit palletized formats.[28]
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The Radeon 4000 series gets axed:
http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/GPU119Win8GPUDriverSupport.aspx

nVIDIA?

3) More important... whoever used Windows 8 Preview, how does the graphics part (2D/3D performance wise) looks like vs prev gen Windows? Don't really care about the finger interface much.
 
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Magic Carpet said:
Well yeah... :]

I wonder if they (ATI) didn't wanna mess with non DX11 GPUs... looks like a software limitation to me.
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It's probably a combination of that and the fact that the 4000 series would be lacking certain modern features that would be necessary for (or improve the implementation of) WDDM 1.2. I don't believe it would be possible to implement the TDR improvements on the 4000 series for example, because of how its command processor is organized.
 
ViRGE said:
It's probably a combination of that and the fact that the 4000 series would be lacking certain modern features that would be necessary for (or improve the implementation of) WDDM 1.2. I don't believe it would be possible to implement the TDR improvements on the 4000 series for example, because of how its command processor is organized.
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The only major feature, separating the 4000's from the 5000's is DX11 support which is probably the main reason.
 
Magic Carpet said:
The only major feature, separating the 4000's from the 5000's is DX11 support which is probably the main reason.
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Actually WDDM 1.2 doesn't require D3D11. There are variances in it for GPUs with lesser feature sets (the 1.2 specification itself goes into detail about this), though that's primarily for defining how SoC GPUs (which won't have DX11) should operate.
 
ViRGE said:
Actually WDDM 1.2 doesn't require D3D11. There are variances in it for GPUs with lesser feature sets (the 1.2 specification itself goes into detail about this), though that's primarily for defining how SoC GPUs (which won't have DX11) should operate.
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You're right. ATI/AMD is just plain lazy.

 
Magic Carpet said:
You're right. ATI/AMD is just plain lazy.

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No, they're not lazy, which is the point I'm trying to make. There's a very real possibility that the 4000 series and below would never be able to meet the TDR requirements.
 
So, is there anything the HD4000 series could gain by having WDDM 1.2, that it now won't?

I have a HD4870, I hope it's a limitation rather than AMD just not bothering...Despite all these new cards coming out I don't feel an urge necessary to upgrade
 
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