AMD has been featured in so many news articles recently with alleged buyouts from tech companies such as Microsoft, Samsung and Intel. However, the bigger news, which spawned more controversy, were comments made by an AMD executive on a couple of subreddits: /r/advancedmicrodevices and /r/pcmasterrace.
Robert Hallock, head of global technical marketing at AMD, was instigated by a Redditor from /r/advancedmicrodevices to give his thoughts on an Oxide employee's post in a tech-oriented forum.
The said employee stated that the AMD Radeon R9 290X is outperforming Nvidia's current GeForce 900 series flagship, the GTX 980 Ti, on DirectX 12-based tests made with Ashes of the Singularity, a game that Oxide is developing. Note that DX12 exposes Async compute that DX11 does not and thus, gave the 290X better performance over the 980 Ti.
Hallock, in response, said that Oxide has summarized his 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," Hallock added. "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."
Hallock then proceeded to note that AMD's endeavors in teaching game developers how to work with a low-level API is paying off and is evident from the numerous DX12 game titles that formed a partnership with the Sunnyvale-based chip developer.
"You will find that the vast majority of DX12 titles in 2015/2016 are partnering with AMD," elaborated the AMD exec.
On the same Reddit thread, Hallock also addressed queries on why the Fury X did not ship out with HDMI 2.0.
"Because those aspects of the product taped out (completed engineering) before HDMI 2.0 could be incorporated," he answered while noting that DP 1.2 to HDMI 2.0 adapters are expected to come in the next few weeks, which will allow content to be played at 60Hz in a 4K display.
"I think gamers are learning an important lesson: there's no such thing as 'full support' for DX12 on the market today," Hallock wrote on another subreddit, /r/pcmasterrace. In relation to what he said, Hallock also revealed that Raster Ordered Views (ROVs) and Conservative Raster are the DX12 aspects missing from the Fury X, both of which they found workarounds for.
The technical marketing head followed it up and said that there have been dubious marketing campaigns to blur the truth regarding features and the definition of "support," which in turn create unneeded confusion and failed expectations. He concluded the post by noting that AMD is pleased with how the people can now see the relevance and interrelationship of GCN, Mantle, DX12, Vulkan and LiquidVR.
AMD is yet to release a definitive list of DX12 titles that have partnered with it. The only confirmed ones are Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Ashes of the Singularity and Hitman (2015).
