Ashes of the Singularity - one of the first games that will support DirectX 12

[Stefan]

Ashes of the Singularity Can Handle Upto 20000 Units At Once, DX12 Allows Thousands of Light Sources

Stardock Studios' upcoming real time strategy game Ashes of the Singularity was the star of this year's GDC. It's one of the first games that will support DirectX 12 and it goes without saying that it looks gorgeous...

One of the biggest changes was the inclusion of an Asynchronous Scheduler that makes sure all GPU commands are being processed parallelly.
"The big thing here is that Nitrous has what you call an Asynchronous Scheduler. In a normal engine, like pretty much every engine that's been released, commands that are going to be sent to your graphics card are serialized. You send them to the scheduler, it serializes them up, and they go one at a time. What we've managed to do with Nitrous is that it's done in parallel. So it's Asynchronous, every single core on your CPU can talk to your graphics card at the same time."
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So is this happening due to Microsoft's upcoming API, DirectX 12? "DX12, Mantle and Vulkan make it really practical, so even under DirectX11 we're doing a lot of crazy stuff with all the cores but the problem with DirectX 11 is that even with our scheduler, DirectX11 still serializes up a lot of our commands so we lose a lot of benefits. Not all of it but you know, a substantial amount, so we have to turn down a lot of our cool effects. But we're still able to do thousands of units on-screen at once, we just can't show them at quite the same glory. On DirectX 12 though they get out of our way entirely and we can have complete control of the GPU."