AMD: There is no GPU with full DirectX 12 support

Posted on Tuesday, September 01 2015 @ 14:39 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
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Robert Hallock, global technical marketing lead for AMD, chimed in on a DirectX 12 debate at Reddit. He writes the comments from game developer Oxide confirm NVIDIA's Maxwell GPU does not fully support DX12 as it's "utterly incapable" of handling async compute:
Oxide effectively summarized my thoughts on the matter. NVIDIA claims "full support" for DX12, but conveniently ignores that Maxwell is utterly incapable of performing asynchronous compute without heavy reliance on slow context switching.

GCN has supported async shading since its inception, and it did so because we hoped and expected that gaming would lean into these workloads heavily. Mantle, Vulkan and DX12 all do. The consoles do (with gusto). PC games are chock full of compute-driven effects.

If memory serves, GCN has higher FLOPS/mm² than any other architecture, and GCN is once again showing its prowess when utilized with common-sense workloads that are appropriate for the design of the architecture.
Hallock also points out that there's no such thing as a GPU with full DX12 support on the market today:
I think gamers are learning an important lesson: there's no such thing as "full support" for DX12 on the market today.

There have been many attempts to distract people from this truth through campaigns that deliberately conflate feature levels, individual untiered features and the definition of "support." This has been confusing, and caused so much unnecessary heartache and rumor-mongering.

Here is the unvarnished truth: Every graphics architecture has unique features, and no one architecture has them all. Some of those unique features are more powerful than others.

Yes, we're extremely pleased that people are finally beginning to see the game of chess we've been playing with the interrelationship of GCN, Mantle, DX12, Vulkan and LiquidVR.
For example, these are the DX12 features missing in Fury:
Raster Ordered Views and Conservative Raster. Thankfully, the techniques that these enable (like global illumination) can already be done in other ways at high framerates (see: DiRT Showdown).


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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