Skip to main content

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI will have a DirectX 12 renderer optimized for AMD's Radeon GPUs

AMD said on Wednesday that it has partnered with 2K Games and Firaxis Games to inject a special DirectX 12 renderer optimized for Radeon graphics chips into the engine powering the upcoming turn-based strategy game, Sid Meier’s Civilization VI.

That means the game will support Asynchronous Compute and Explicit Multi-Adapter, the former of which is “exclusively” supported by AMD’s Graphics Core Next and Polaris architectures (that is a contentious claim — Nvidia says it does support Asynchronous Compute, but AMD and some critics say it does not.)

Recommended Videos

“For 25 years the Civilization franchise has set the standard for beautiful and masterfully crafted turn based strategy,” said Steve Meyer, Director of Software Development, Firaxis Games. “AMD has been a premiere contributor to that reputation in past Civilization titles, and we’re excited to once again join forces to deliver a landmark experience in Sid Meier’s Civilization VI.”

Asynchronous Compute is a hardware performance feature of AMD’s Polaris and Graphics Core Next graphics architectures supported by DirectX 12. It enables compute and graphics tasks to be executed in parallel, eliminating the need for each to be handled in a step-by-step process. This ability eliminates the “bubbles” that pop up when the GPU is waiting for further instructions from the API’s process of rendering.

As an example on how this works, if the Radeon GPU is rendering complex lighting and a “bubble” appears, the chip will fill that void with needed compute work from the game engine, such as the one powering the upcoming Civilization VI. This extra work could be anything useful to speed up the overall rendering process, like computing the behavior of AI.

“Filling these bubbles improves GPU utilization, input latency, efficiency and performance for the user by minimizing or eliminating the ripple of delays that could stall other graphics cards,” AMD explains on its Radeon website.

As for Explicit Multi-Adapter, this is basically official DirectX support from Microsoft (finally) for more than one installed graphics card. In previous versions, DirectX doesn’t provide specific extensions that support multi-GPU configurations — but the API doesn’t exactly prevent support either. As AMD puts it, before DirectX 12, there were very few tools or features to enable multi-GPU support “with gusto.”

Thus, with Explicit Multi-Adapter, game developers can now control the workloads of their engine in use across all installed GPUs, and manage the resources offered by each installed graphics chip. Developers can utilize tools like Split-Frame Rendering, which breaks each game frame down into tiles and assigns one tile to each graphics chip. In turn, these tiles are assembled simultaneously to produce one single frame on the display. Essentially, this all means lower input latency, higher framerates, higher image quality, and so on.

Split-Frame Rendering actually made its debut in Sid Meier’s Civilization Beyond Earth. Other notable “intense” collaborations between AMD, 2K Games, and Firaxis Games include using the now-defunct Mantle API in Civilization Beyond Earth, which hit Windows PC, Mac, and Linux back in the last quarter of 2014. The new Civilization VI game is slated for the same platforms on October 21, 2016.

With all that said, keep in mind that in order to get these cool DirectX 12 features used by the upcoming game, players will need Windows 10. If you haven’t moved up the Windows ladder yet, there’s still a wee little bit of time left before Microsoft pulls the plug on its free upgrade program.

Kevin Parrish
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Kevin started taking PCs apart in the 90s when Quake was on the way and his PC lacked the required components. Since then…
ChatGPT now interprets photos better than an art critic and an investigator combined
OpenAI press image

ChatGPT's recent image generation capabilities have challenged our previous understing of AI-generated media. The recently announced GPT-4o model demonstrates noteworthy abilities of interpreting images with high accuracy and recreating them with viral effects, such as that inspired by Studio Ghibli. It even masters text in AI-generated images, which has previously been difficult for AI. And now, it is launching two new models capable of dissecting images for cues to gather far more information that might even fail a human glance.

OpenAI announced two new models earlier this week that take ChatGPT's thinking abilities up a notch. Its new o3 model, which OpenAI calls its "most powerful reasoning model" improves on the existing interpretation and perception abilities, getting better at "coding, math, science, visual perception, and more," the organization claims. Meanwhile, the o4-mini is a smaller and faster model for "cost-efficient reasoning" in the same avenues. The news follows OpenAI's recent launch of the GPT-4.1 class of models, which brings faster processing and deeper context.

Read more
Microsoft’s Copilot Vision AI is now free to use, but only for these 9 sites
Copilot Vision graphic.

After months of teasers, previews, and select rollouts, Microsoft's Copilot Vision is now available to try for all Edge users in the U.S. The flashy new AI tool is designed to watch your screen as you browse so you can ask it various questions about what you're doing and get useful context-appropriate responses. The main catch, however, is that it currently only works with nine websites.

For the most part, these nine websites seem like pretty random choices, too. We have Amazon, which makes sense, but also Geoguessr? I'm pretty sure the point of that site is to try and guess where you are on the map without any help. Anyway, the full site list is as follows:

Read more
Fun things to ask ChatGPT now that it remembers everything
ChatGPT on a laptop

If you hadn't heard, ChatGPT's memory just got a whole lot better. Rolled out across the world to Plus and Pro users over the past few days, ChatGPT's various models can now reference almost any past conversation you had. It doesn't remember everything word for word, but can pull significant details, themes, and important points of reference from just about anything you've ever said to it.

It feels a little creepy at times, but ChatGPT can now be used for much more personalized tasks. OpenAI pitches this as a way to improve its scheduling feature to use it as a personal assistant, or to help you continue longer chats over extended periods of time. But it's also quite fun to see what ChatGPT can tell you by trawling throughh all your chatlogs. It's often surprising some of the answers it spits out in response.

Read more