“Full support for DirectX 12 does not exist”

Nvidia is once again in the hot air after the game studio Oxide Games noticed that the latest graphics processors with the architecture Maxwell can not handle Async Compute, which is considered an important feature in DirectX 12. AMD was not late in giving the competitor a boot, but now takes history a new turn.

I think gamers are learning an important lesson: there’s no such thing as “full support” for DX12 on the market today. […] 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.

In a post on Reddit, Robert Hallock at AMD tries to pour oil on the waves by pointing out that no graphics architecture on the market today can fully support DirectX 12, perhaps to precede criticism that even AMD lacks support for certain parts. However, he adds that some features are more powerful than others.

However, the situation is much more complicated than that. DirectX 12 contains both mandatory and optional features, which can also be supported to varying degrees. Microsoft specifies two sets of minimum common denominators under the collective names Feature Level 12_0 and 12_1.

The latter is more complete and at present only Intel Skylake and Nvidia Maxwell (GM2xx) formally meet the requirements. AMD’s latest graphics processors with the Graphics Core Next architecture, including the Radeon R9 Fury series (Fiji), stay at Feature Level 12_0.

In addition, there are a total of nine capacity levels (tiers), where AMD GCN 1.2 on the other hand can handle more than its main competitor Nvidia Maxwell. These are divided into three each for resource binding, tiled resources and conservative rasterization. Many are completely optional, others can be supported in hardware or emulated with software.

In fact, neither AMD nor Nvidia are the best at DirectX 12 without the processor giant Intel. The ninth generation integrated graphics in the Skylake processor family meets Feature Level 12_1 with the highest capacity level in almost all areas.

It becomes even more difficult to grasp, given that not all features are equally important. Some will be used more than others and depending on the characteristics of the graphics processor affect performance to varying degrees. It is also not uncommon for some features to remain more or less unused due to difficult-to-handle side effects.

Since there is so far only one game title for DirectX 12, it will therefore only be a guessing game to try to figure out which graphics processors in practice earn the most on Microsoft’s new graphics interface. In other words, the big question is far from settled.