AMD and Ubisoft revealed that both Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus and Far Cry 5 will support Rapid Packed Math; a new feature that is – at least for now – exclusive to AMD’s latest RX Vega graphics cards. According to the developers, Rapid Packed Math allows a graphics card to execute two math instructions for the price of one.
This basically means that both of these games should, theoretically, run way faster with FP16 compute than with the standard FP32 compute that pretty much all games currently use.
As said, this feature is being supported exclusively by the AMD RX Vega graphics cards that will be released later this month. NVIDIA has not announced plans of supporting it. Do note that this is a hardware feature, meaning that owners of current NVIDIA GPUs won’t be able to benefit from it.
It will be interesting to see whether AMD’s RX Vega GPUs will be able to close the gap between the GTX1080 and the GTX1080Ti via Rapid Packed Math. It will also be interesting to see whether other future games will support it as right now, only these two upcoming games – as well as a benchmark from FutureMark – will support Rapid Packed Math.
Not only that, but AMD’s RX Vega GPUs offer the most complete support for Microsoft’s DX12 API. Again, we don’t know whether developers will take advantage of all these DX12 features and whether these features are enough to boost the performance of AMD’s GPUs in order to compete with NVIDIA’s GPUs.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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