DX12 Summary and Clarifications

Yakk

Yakk

Supreme [H]ardness
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Reading through some threads I see more than a few people still do not understand the difference between DX12 Tiers and Feature Levels. The amount of clickbait sites and rumors further spread disinformation.

Here is one of the better explanations I've read of both :

http://www.bitsandchips.it/english/52-english-news/5661-clarifications-about-tier-and-feature-levels-of-the-directx-12

Microsoft could've done a better job separating the hardware paths so misdirected marketing & clickbait sites would've had less of a chance to twist information and spread fud.
 
In the end, as regards the support of every single capability, it is currently not possible, nor appropriate, to draw up a complete and well-defined table showing the support of on sale hardware.
Unless you name is AMD, INTEL or NVIDIA, you cannot present such report with the drivers currently available on the public channels, nor with non-NDA documentation, therefore everything else is only to be considered as pure rants
Click to expand...

He makes a mistake with this one ;) .
So he is making a rant ;) .

Every single capability is not correct that would suggest that you have instruction(s) that would not work on some hardware. since the API is low level it would not have to rely upon this, if it was a high level API then it would rely on this.
 
Driver support is probably a bit wonky still in some cases but it's inching closer. Public WDDM 2.0 drivers are not the swiftest to release. The last AMD one looks like 5/22.

I can only create a device with the 11.1 feature level, 12 fails - which looks correct for my 7870. MS doesn't seem to list the 12 feature levels yet in the documentation.

Pieter3dnow said:
He makes a mistake with this one ;) .
So he is making a rant ;) .

Every single capability is not correct that would suggest that you have instruction(s) that would not work on some hardware. since the API is low level it would not have to rely upon this, if it was a high level API then it would rely on this.
Click to expand...

The feature levels stuff is just like DX11 and you must opt in to a certain level when you first set up. You'll fail here if you try and use a feature level that's higher than your hardware supports.

If you're initialized and exceed limits set by the current feature level, you'll be subsequently warned if you're opted into the debug run time and the operation will fail.
 
But that sounds as a hardware validation. That different tiers are used does not exclude cards from code it should choose another way to process the code...
 
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