What is new in the Release Candidate for C++ AMP
With the release and announcement of Visual Studio 2012 RC, you get among other things an updated version of C++ AMP. Our goal was that you could recompile your Visual Studio 11 Beta projects with the Visual Studio 2012 RC bits, and see no breaking changes in your usage of C++ AMP - we came extremely close to that goal. Read on.
Performance
If you are wondering what is new for C++ AMP in RC (besides numerous bug fixes), the biggest item is performance. We have a couple of performance items that did not make it in the RC (and are on track for the RTM version), but most of our planned performance improvements are in the RC bits that you can download today. As a reminder, here are a couple of useful links for measuring performance with C++ AMP:
Recompile, re-measure the performance, and let us know if you think there are areas we can still improve.
Async operations can be chained together
Beyond performance, we have made one medium API massaging to improve asynchronous operations and we already shared on our blog
We hope you like what we've done there...
Renaming and slight changes within amp_graphics.h
In the Beta we introduced for the first time amp_graphics.h and the concurrency::graphics namespace with Short Vector Types and Texture support. In the RC you'll find a behavioral change including a rename of bits_per_channel (now bits_per_scalar_element). All our related blog posts have been updated, and I encourage you to start with this post and follow the links from there:
This is really the only place where you need to make minor edits before successfully recompiling your Beta projects with the RC.
Learn C++ AMP
We have re-read all our C++ AMP blog posts, including re-testing all the samples to ensure everything is still valid with the latest Release Candidate. So if you are new here, start with the links on the side and read our blog content , the de facto reference for learning C++ AMP. As usual, your comments are welcome in our MSDN Forum.