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Today’s graphics renderers provide many opportunities to take advantage of asynchronous processing, but for some applications the lack of determinism in terms of when certain tasks are executed could diminish the benefits. In these cases the renderer needs to know that a given task will be able to start and complete within a certain time frame.
In order to meet this requirement, time-critical tasks must be given higher priority access to processing resources than other tasks. One way to accomplish this is using pre-emption, which works by temporarily suspending other tasks until a designated task can be completed. However the effectiveness of this approach depends on when and how quickly an in-process task can be interrupted; task switching overhead or other delays can impact responsiveness, and potentially manifest as stuttering or lag in graphics applications.
To address this problem, we have introduced the idea of a quick response queue. Tasks submitted into this special queue get preferential access to GPU resources while running asynchronously, so they can overlap with other workloads. Because the Asynchronous Compute Engines in the GCN architecture are programmable and can manage resource scheduling in hardware, this feature can be enabled on existing GPUs (2nd generation GCN or later) with a driver update ...
