If you’re a PC gamer, then there is a pretty good chance for you to play games on a Windows 10 PC. When Microsoft introduced its new OS back in 2015, the company wanted PC gamers to know that Windows 10 would be the best Windows ever for gaming thanks to DirectX 12, a collection of APIs designed to help Windows run multimedia content as efficiently as possible.
On a video that Microsoft published during Build 2016 in March, the company explained that DirectX 12 would allow developers to use the full capabilities of a PC’s GPU and offer up to 20% increase in GPU performance as well as up to 50% improvement in overall CPU usage.
DirectX 12 also makes it possible to maximize the use two video cards simultaneously to improve performance, though it’s not an automatic process as developers have to work to support it on their games. However, according to a new report from Neowin, Microsoft will soon make it easier for developers to implement multi-GPU scaling.
Right now, the Explicit Multi Adaptor (EMA) feature that allows two DirectX 12 video cards to work in synergy is actually a low-level tool that is hard to implement in games and can even hurt performance if used incorrectly by developers. But Microsoft is working to add a new abstraction layer that will allow game developers to add basic multi-GPU support with only minimal coding. However, unlocking the full capabilities of EMA will still require them to implement it the hard way.
Microsoft engineer Bob Brown shared that the company would soon publish the new abstractive layer on GitHub:
We will also be publishing two mGPU sample projects along with it – one using the layer and one not using the layer. We’re making some final tweaks and doing additional testing and plan to post it all soon
We’re looking forward to seeing more games support DirectX12 multi-GPU scaling on Windows 10, and if you’re a PC gamer that has yet to make the upgrade that should definitely be a good reason to do it before July 29.
