According to a new report, it appears that AMD's Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture does not support Direct3D feature-level 12 (DirectX 12.1) and this could be a big win for Nvidia.

According to a report from Computerbase.de, AMD's GCN architecture only supports Direct3D up to feature-level 12_0 (DirectX 12), while feature-level 12_1, with Volume-Tiled Resources, Conservative Rasterization and Rasterizer Ordered Views features is not supported.

The Volume Tiled-resources is a new tiled-resources features where GPU seeks and loads just those portions of larger textures that are need for that scene, rather than loading the entire texture, which should reduce video memory usage. Conservative Rasterization feature draws polygons with additional pixels making it easier for two polygons to interact with each other in dynamic objects, while Raster Ordered Views optimize raster loads in the order in which they appear in an object and can be used to improve shadows.

This puts AMD in a bad position, or pretty much in the same position that Nvidia was with its Kepler GPU and feature-level 11.1. While Nvidia's Maxwell supports feature-level 12_1, this explains why Nvidia was so focused on Direct3D 12_1 at its Geforce GTX 980 Ti launch.

AMD's newest GPU will most likely support the Direct3D 12_1 but bear in mind that recent rumors suggested that most of AMD's upcoming Radeon 300 series are improved (higher clocks) rebrands based on Radeon 200 series graphics cards and already available GPUs.

Nvidia will certainly benefit from this and we will still have to wait and see AMD's upcoming Radeon 300 lineup and the new Fiji GPU.



Source: Computerbase.de.