To make life easier for developers by grouping together common features. If you stick to feature levels, you don't have to plan for a scenario where you have ROVs but no conservative rasterizer, or bindless but no tiled resources, for example.So what's the point of feature levels and tiers? Just marketing fodder?
Developers that want to go off the beaten path can certainly do so, but you can stick to feature levels if that will make your life more sane.
Edit: And I should probably note that there are a number of gotchas. In FL11_1 you can't access certain features unless you support other features, etc. Which is why NV supports most FL11_1 features (and they can be used) without supporting it all
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