Direct3D 12 does not have this concept. And the reason for that limitation ultimately boils down to why transient allocation exists. TL;DR: It's not for doing the kind of thing you're trying to do.
Vulkan's render pass system exists for one purpose: to make tile-based renderers first-class citizens of the rendering system. TBRs do not fit well in OpenGL or D3D's framebuffer model. In both APIs, you can just swap framebuffers in and out whenever you want.
TBRs do not render to memory directly. They perform rendering operations into internal buffers, which are seeded from memory and then possibly written to memory after the rendering operation is complete. Switching rendered images whenever you want works against this structure, which is why TBR vendors have a list of things you're not supposed to do if you want high-performance in your OpenGL ES code.
Vulkan's render pass system is an abstraction of a TBR system. In the abstract model, the render pass system potentially reads data from the images in the frame buffer, then performs a bunch of subpasses on copies of this data, and at the end, potentially writes the updated data back out into the images. So from the outside of the process, it looks like you're rendering to the images, but you're not. To maintain this illusion, for the duration of a render pass, you can only use those framebuffer images in the way that the render pass model allows: as attachments.
Now consider deferred rendering. In deferred rendering, you render to g-buffers, which you then read in your lighting passes to generate the final image. Once you've generated the final image, you don't need those g-buffers anymore. In a regular GPU, that doesn't mean anything; because rendering goes directly to memory, those g-buffers must take up actual storage.
But consider how a TBR works. It does rendering into a single tile; in optimal cases, it processes all of the fragments for a single tile at once. Which means it goes through the geometry and lighting passes. For a TBR, the g-buffer is just a piece of scratch memory you use to get the final answer; it doesn't need to be read from memory or copied to memory.
In short, it doesn't need memory.
Enter lazily allocated memory and transient attachment images. They exist to allow TBRs to keep g-buffers in tile memory and never to have to allocate actual storage for them (or at least, it only happens if some runtime circumstance occurs that forces it, like shoving too much geometry at the GPU). And it only works within a render pass; if you end a render pass and have to use one of the g-buffers in another render pass, then the magic has to go away and the data has to touch actual storage.
The Vulkan API makes how specific this use case is very explicit. You cannot bind a piece of lazily-allocated memory to an image that does not have the USAGE_TRANSIENT_ATTACHMENT
flag set on it (or to a buffer of any kind). And you'll notice that it says "transient attachment", as in render pass attachments. It says this because you'll also notice that transient attachments cannot be used for non-attachment uses (part of the valid usage tests for VkImageCreateInfo
). At all.
What you want to do is not the sort of thing that lazily allocated memory is made for. It can't work.
As for Direct3D 12, the API is not designed to run on mobile GPUs, and since only mobile GPUs are tile-based renderers (some recent desktop GPUs have TBR similarities, but are not full TBRs), it has no facilities designed explicitly for them. And thus, it has no need for lazily allocated memory or transient attachments.