Does Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling boost performance – Tested with RTX

Conclusion – Is Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling worth it?

While Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling sounds like a great feature, it must be remembered that most PC games don’t have a problem with memory utilisation, at least right now.   

Another thing that’s worth noting is that Nvidia has stated that Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling “can potentially improve performance and reduce latency”, which means that performance boosts which come from this technology were always going to be marginal at best. If the feature offered us more than that, you could expect Nvidia to be singing about it from their rooftops and publishing their own benchmarks on the matter. They aren’t and that says a lot about how useful this feature is right now. 

Moving forward, games are going to start putting more stress on memory controllers. Both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 are upgrading to 16GB GDDR6 memory configurations and higher resolution targets, which means that future PC games will target more memory and demand more bandwidth than ever before. 

Perhaps we would have seen a larger performance impact on more bandwidth-constrained Nvidia graphics cards, like Nvidia’s GDDR5-based GTX 1650 and GTX 1660 (non-Super). Unfortunately, we have neither of these GPUs in-house to test at this time. 

Ray-tracing is also going to become a lot more common over the next few years, and so far, ray-tracing has been found to be very memory intensive, both when it comes to VRAM capacity utilisation and bandwidth requirements, which could make Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling a lot more important in the future. 

Right now, PC gamers shouldn’t expect Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling to deliver huge performance enhancements. If there are any performance gains, they will be marginal at best. While that isn’t something to get excited about, bringing more hardware acceleration to the GPU ecosystem is undoubtedly a good thing. 

So far, Nvidia is the only GPU manufacturer to support Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling on their latest graphics cards. AMD may follow Nvidia’s lead in time, but at the time of writing team Radeon has been silent on the issue. That said, given the minimal, arguably non-existent performance impact of this update, does AMD really need to rush its support for it? 

You can join the discussion on Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling’s impact on Nvidia graphics performance on the OC3D Forums.