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fatslob-:O on 05 June 2016
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Pemalite said:

nVidia has taken note of async compute, they were stubborn to update their GPU's to take advantage of the spec. (Like they were with Tessellation/Direct X 11/Direct X 10.1)
nVidia also petitions/works with AMD and Microsoft and even Intel when it comes to the Direct X spec, so it's not like they were ignorant of things. :P

But even when nVidia was behind technologically, nVidia still had the largest marketshare and one could say they "sabotaged" performance and features for AMD, like Asassins Creed's Direct X 10.1 path, nVidia was still stuck on Direct X 10, AMD had a performance advantage on the games release, but that was patched away.

AMD simply doesn't have the resources or connections in the industry that nVidia has nor does it have the marketing budget or marketshare, so it's driver extensions will likely never gain the same kind of industry support that AMD has, which is sad because things like TressFX is amazing.

How exactly does AMD not have the connections ? Literally EVERY major ISV relations teams works with the game developers including AMD ... 

There's no reason to hold the absolutely pessimistic view that AMD's driver extensions will never get into games when similar built-ins are already used on consoles and with shader model 6 coming in the near future it too will expose more functionality already found on consoles ... 

As a sidenote I prefer hairworks to TressFX ...  

Pemalite said:


That is the point I was trying to make. 

Backwards compatability isn't always black and white and clear cut, even in the PC space things change, but unlike consoles software isn't written as closely to the hardware, relying on all it's particular nuances, that kinda complicates backwards compatability.
In say 10 years, who is to guarentee that you could drop a PS4 disc into the PS5 and have it executed natively? This is the assumption many people assume because the PS4 is using pretty standard x86 hardware.

Backwards compatibility seems more likely than ever since GPU microarchitectures are converging more closely than ever since DirectX12 is practically designed to last around the 3 major IHVs ... 

I agree that it's fallacious to assume backwards compatibility with just the ISA in CPUs but in the most likely upcoming case I'd say backwards compatibility comes down to the API design like whether or not they exposed GPU microcode ...