At the GDC, NVIDIA and Microsoft have presented a collaboration to standardize the use of artificial intelligence within DirectX. The goal is to address two persistent problems in PC development: shader compilation times and stutters during gameplay. The proposal includes new tools and a shader delivery system that promises to unify and simplify the graphics workflow.🚀
Microsoft ASD and tools for graphical AIðŸ§
The cornerstone is Microsoft Advanced Shader Delivery (ASD), a system that will distribute precompiled shaders with the game, eliminating runtime compilation on the user's machine. Alongside this, DirectX Linear Algebra (DXLA) and DirectX Compute Graph Compiler are introduced. These tools allow developers to integrate machine learning models directly into the graphics pipeline, optimizing tasks like upscaling or denoisers natively.
Goodbye to stutters, hello to 200 GB downloads💾
With ASD, we say goodbye to stuttering caused by shader compilation at the start of each game session. In exchange, game installers could reach sizes worthy of a full operating system. It's just a matter of choosing your favorite nightmare: waiting for every shadow to compile in a new map or letting the game take up more space than your meme collection on the hard drive. Efficiency has its price, and it's measured in terabytes.