AMD Disabled Async-Compute On Older GCN 1.0 Video Cards?

AMD allegedly disabled asynchronous-compute technology support on older generations of Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture according to claims over on Reddit. It appears AMD disabled Async Compute on GCN 1.0 hardware (Southern Islands based GPUs going back to the Radeon HD 7000 series) starting with Crimson 16.9.2 drivers. With the newer drivers on one of these older cards it has been discovered that there is no longer support for asynchronous-compute. This is hurting performance on the older cards in DirectX 12 game titles that support Async-Compute. Some recent game titles like Total War Hammer, Gears of War 4 and Ashes of the Singularity can benefit from async-compute, so why would AMD disable such a feature on their first-generation GCN architecture? Could they have disabled it by accident and just never noticed and kept rolling out drivers? To be fair, AMD Radeon Software Crimson 16.9.2 drivers came out on September 21st, 2016. It’s been 2.5 months and people are only now just starting to notice.

One AMD community member noticed that Total War: Warhammer and Rise of The Tomb Raider weren’t supporting Async compute on GCN 1.0 and an AMD employee told him to ask game developers instead. He also included patch notes that show DirectX 12 Asynchronous Compute was added for AMD GCN 1.1 GPUs, but the original poster already knew that. Ouch.

We reached out to AMD this morning and they told us that they are looking into it.