AMD Accused of Disabling Async Compute on Older GPUs

Since the release of the Radeon Crimson Software Driver 16.9.2, it seems that AMD may have disabled DirectX 12 Asynchronous Compute technology on graphics cards that run first-generation Graphics CoreNext (GCN) architecture, despite the hardware supposedly being able to Aync Compute.

While AMD has blamed developers for disabling Async Compute on GCN 1.0 architecture – 1.1 and above retains Async Compute utilisation – with titles like Total War: Warhammer and Rise of the Tomb Raider, users of the Beyond3D forum – and this angry redditor – have determined that the problem stems from AMD’s very own drivers, starting with 16.9.2.

Beyond3D forum members put Stardock’s real-time strategy Ashes of the Singularity through its paces on GCN 1.0 hardware, comparing older drivers to version 16.9.2. The tests found that Ashes of the Singularity performed much better using the older drivers, which support Async Compute, to the newer one, which doesn’t.

User Kwee- reports the following results:

• AMD Drivers 15.7.1 and inferior to 16.9.2 Compute only: 1. 49.01ms

          Graphics only: 47.38ms (35.41G pixels/s)

          Graphics + compute: 1. 49.12ms (34.16G pixels/s)

          Async Compute works!

• AMD Drivers superior to 16.9.2

          Compute only: 1. 45.25ms

          Graphics only: 47.14ms (35.59G pixels/s)

          Graphics + compute: 1. 92.39ms (18.16G pixels/s)

          Async Compute broken!

The results are far from conclusive; the test is not a benchmark, and was only conducted on one game. However, it does tally with a number of anecdotal reports.