[ack_complete]

This is unfortunately the same for GPUs. The graphics APIs expose capability bits or extensions indicating what features the hardware and driver supports, but the graphics vendors don't always publish documentation on what generations of their hardware support various features, so your program is expected to dynamically adapt to arbitrary combinations of features. This is no longer as bad as it used to be due to consolidation in the graphics market, but people still have to build ad-hoc crowd sourced databases of GPU caps bits.

It's also not monotonic, on both CPU and GPU sides features can go away later because either due to a hardware bug or the vendor lost interest in supporting it.