AMD caught a lucky break earlier this week when it was discovered that NVIDIA's Maxwell GPUs don't support DirectX 12's Async Compute feature natively. Today, AMD admitted that its latest GCN GPUs are missing some DirectX 12 features as well.
Replying to a Reddit thread, AMD’s Robert Hallock admitted that there are no graphics cards with "full support" for DirectX 12 in 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."
When asked to name the DirectX 12 features not supported by AMD hardware, Hallock listed "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)."
