One of the best new features in the newly released Windows 10 May 2020 Update is now supported by both leading graphics card makers. GPU scheduling is now on for NVIDIA and AMD.
While the former was actually first to market, NVIDIA’s announcement was somewhat overshadowed by the company’s support for the latest DirectX 12 Ultimate standard.
But now, AMD has also released a beta driver to support this new feature in Windows 10 version 2004. The release you are looking for is Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.5.1 Beta, with the feature available on Radeon RX 5600 and RX 5700 series of graphics cards.
AMD describes this as:
“By moving scheduling responsibilities from software into hardware, this feature has the potential to improve GPU responsiveness and to allow additional innovation in GPU workload management in the future.”
Microsoft has designed the hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling feature to reduce the latency caused by the buffering between the CPU and GPU.
The feature is off by default, and the interface to set it on will only appear if the GPU and the GPU driver supports the GPU scheduler.
And the reason for this cautious approach, according to Redmond, is that hardware scheduling still needs to go through a round of testing with Windows Insiders, before the appropriate drivers will be released to the mainstream population.
Recent releases of Insider previews also now support hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling.
Once ready, and a fair amount of A/B testing is done, Microsoft plans to publish these drivers through Windows Update for all users rocking the public version of the May 2020 Update.
