Lack of Async Compute on Maxwell Makes AMD GCN Better Prepared for DirectX 12

It turns out that NVIDIA's "Maxwell" architecture has an Achilles' heel after all, which tilts the scales in favor of competing AMD Graphics CoreNext architecture better prepared for DirectX 12. "Maxwell" lacks support for async compute, one of the three highlight features of Direct3D 12, even as the GeForce driver "exposes" the feature's presence to apps. This came to light when game developer Oxide Games claimed that it was pressurized by NVIDIA's marketing department to remove certain features in its "Ashes of the Singularity" DirectX 12 benchmark.

Async Compute is a standardized API-level feature, which allows an app to better exploit the number-crunching resources of a GPU, by breaking down its graphics rendering tasks. Since NVIDIA driver tells apps that "Maxwell" GPUs supports it, Oxide Games simply created its benchmark with async compute support, but when it attempted to use it on Maxwell, it was an "unmitigated disaster." During to course of its developer correspondence with NVIDIA to try and fix this issue, it learned that "Maxwell" doesn't really support async compute at the bare-metal level, and that NVIDIA driver bluffs its support to apps. NVIDIA instead started pressurizing Oxide to remove parts of its code that use async compute altogether, it alleges.

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