Higher Fidelity Graphics with Less Memory at Microsoft Build

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Tiled Resource support in Direct3D was introduced today by Microsoft at its annual Build developer conference. Tiled Resources are a major advance in application flexibility in managing memory, and I’m excited to think about the applications this will open up. Before Tiled Resources, all memory surfaces in Direct3D had to be fully physically resident in DRAM. Tiled Resources are different – they are memory resources whose constituent pages (tiles) may be optionally populated with corresponding physical memory. Microsoft has created a standard hardware interface to what was previously a software-only technology, which will mean a more powerful, efficient generalization of earlier texture-only technologies.
 
The BUILD 2013 keynote was amazing yesterday. The texturing demos they showed for Windows and Xbox were real nice. Windows 8.1 is the dream properly realized.
 
Can this feature be implemented via drivers or does it need hardware support?
 
Ryokurin said:
Considering that they said it was 'Key to Xbox One graphics' I doubt it's Nvidia only.
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To illustrate the usefulness of Tiled Resources, Microsoft shared three demonstration applications all running on NVIDIA GPUs. THIS:confused:
 
Nvidia just announced their mainstream 700 series cards the other day too, so it's reasonable to assume that it was paid for product placement.

Anyhow, the first thing they say in a preview on Youtube is that they worked with Nvidia, AMD and Intel on it, and that it runs on current DX11 hardware, although they didn't specify on if it's optimal with new hardware and is only software compatible.
 
11.2 actually looks like a fairly sizeable update in comparison to 11.1. Dynamic frame buffer scaling, low-latency presentation and mixed-resolution overlay support are notable.

Hard to say whether tiled resources are a big win or not. I'm leaning toward 'not' right now.
 
Interesting. Dynamic frame buffer scaling could make creating game engines a more efficient process, yes?
 
purefun65 said:
To illustrate the usefulness of Tiled Resources, Microsoft shared three demonstration applications all running on NVIDIA GPUs. THIS:confused:
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It shouldn't be too confusing. No doubt one vendor can have driver support for features before another vendor. It could have easily been demonstrated on AMD hardware in other circumstances.

There's probably more to it than that, considering many game developers' definite preferences for one major manufacture over the other.
 
So a lowering of memory overhead for rendering? Is this a nod back to Tile Rendering that we had with the Matrox M3D PowerVR rendering engine back in the late 90's?

I wonder what other tricks they have up their sleeve for DirectX/Xbox One.
 
jbltecnicspro said:
Didn't the Dreamcast use tile-based rendering too? Or is this different?
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I think that used the PowerVR tile rendering. Basically you only render what's actually visible, say the side of the car rather than the whole car as we do today.
 
daglesj said:
I think that used the PowerVR tile rendering. Basically you only render what's actually visible, say the side of the car rather than the whole car as we do today.
Click to expand...

So then, this is the same thing? I see they're talking about memory usage too. Didn't the Dreamcast still have everything in memory? I know it was tile-based, but I believe it only saved in pixel throughput, not actual memory usage... But essentially, this is the same thing except it takes it a step further?
 
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