AMD blog post about Vulkan Renderpasses

AMD are doing some good work around Vulkan, and another blog post highlighting features has arrived. This time they are covering Vulkan Renderpasses.

QuoteAmong the features proposed by our mobile members was the renderpass — an object designed to allow an application to communicate the high-level structure of a frame to the driver. Tiling GPU drivers can use this information to determine when to bring data on and off chip, whether or not to flush data out to memory or discard the content of tile buffers and even to do things like size memory allocations used for binning and other internal operations. This is a feature that Mantle did not have, and is not part of Direct3D® 12 either.

Sounds like a pretty useful feature to have, and something it beats DirectX at for both the mobile and desktop space.

QuoteRenderpasses should not be seen as a “mobile-only” feature. This is a first class feature of the Vulkan API and one which presents a lot of opportunities for optimization and efficiency on the GPU, even for forward, immediate renderers such as the GCN architecture.

See the full blog post here.

We have a lot to thank AMD for, since Vulkan is based on AMD's own Mantle. I can't wait to see the new AMDGPU driver in action on Linux. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.