Microsoft has released Agility SDK 1.613.0, which features some critical components that will be presented to developers at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco next week. The most interesting element is the work graphs, which Microsoft describes as “a whole new paradigm” for graphics cards.

Task graphs enable GPU-based work. Usually, when you play a PC game, there is a relationship between the GPU and the CPU. Your CPU prepares the task and sends it to your GPU, and then your GPU executes that task. Task Graphs is an approach that allows your GPU to schedule and execute its own tasks, which has some huge performance implications.

You can see an early demo of this in the video above. The side-by-side comparison offers almost identical performance, but around 1:20, you can see how the Work Graphs version fares. This is the first version of Work Graphs, so the fact that we’re already seeing such a sharp improvement in some scenes is huge.

It’s easy to think of game performance in a linear fashion, but GPUs handle many tasks in parallel. Rendering a finished scene is complex, so your graphics card handles many different tasks at once. Work graphs are more efficient, allowing threads to move on to other tasks without waiting for more work from the CPU. Add these efficiencies to a complex scene and it can have a significant impact on performance, as evidenced by the first public demonstration.

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In complex scenes that would normally reveal a CPU bottleneck, Job Graphs can maintain high performance. This will hopefully mean that games like Starfield which are heavily CPU dependent will maintain a high frame rate in complex areas like New Atlantis.

Job Charts are just now being rolled out to developers, so it will be a while before we see the improvements in games. This is a developer-tailored feature, so it’s not something you’ll see in a graphics menu. Hopefully this means PC games will come out of the gate performing better.

Worksheets are currently supported on Nvidia RTX 30 and 40 series GPUs, as well as AMD RDNA 3 GPUs. There is no support for older cards or Intel GPUs yet.

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