As expected and rumored earlier, Microsoft has now officially announced DirectX 12 partnering up with AMD, Nvidia, Intel and Qualcomm. Microsoft has showcased and revealed some details regarding its new DirectX gaming API at the Game Developers Conference 2014 currently being held in San Francisco.

According to Microsoft, the new DirectX 12 will bring major improvements for developers on all Microsoft's platform, including, of course, the PC, Xbox One and Windows Mobile. The new API will enhance the way modern games talk to GPUs and multi-core CPUs as well as reduce the famous CPU bottleneck, by pushing giving more access to the GPU. "Closer to metal" as Microsoft decided to describe the new DirectX 12 is pretty much what AMD is currently doing with its own Mantle API.

During GDC 2014, Microsoft has teamed up with Turn 10 Studios, the developer of Forza Motorsport 5 game, in order to show some DirectX 12 action running on PC. The demo system was powered by Nvidia GTX Titan Black graphics card and looked quite good in 60FPS at 1080p resolution.

While Microsoft did not want to talk about any precise details regarding when we will actually see some DirectX 12 powered games, it did note that the best guess estimate is holiday 2015 season. The DirectX 12 SDK will roll out to developers in the meantime and it appears that there will not be any limitations regarding operating systems so Windows 7 might have it as well.



Source: Techreport.com.