Direct X 12 will not require new hardware!

Direct X 12 will not require new hardware!

| Source: pcworld Author: Mark Campbell

Direct X 12 will not require new hardware!

When Direct X 12 was announced many PC gamers were worried and pleased in equal measure, happy that Microsoft were finally moving DirectX in a positive way, but fearful that it will require both new hardware and a new operating system.

Two days ago the first of these fears was cast aside, as Microsoft announced that in the first year of Windows 10 that Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 users will be able to upgrade to Windows 10 for free, meaning that pretty much all PC gamers, who legitimately own Windows will be able to upgrade for free.

Now we talk about hardware. For DirectX 12 we already have confirmation from the Graphics card vendors which hardware will support it.

On the Nvidia side they say that all of their DirectX 11 hardware will support it, but this is only a half truth. It is true that all GTX 400 series (Firmi) and above GPU will be able to use DIrect X 12, not all of them will be able to support it fully. Only Nvidia's GTX 900 series GPUs is "Built for DirectX 12", meaning that all other DX11 GPUs will only support the features which can be backported.

A list of Backported Features are yet to be confirmed, as are the full list of DirectX 12 features, but we know that all Nvidia DX11 GPUs will be able to utilise the CPU/GPU benefits gained from using the low level API.

Here is a Quote from Microsoft's Mike Ybarra when asked if gamers needed new graphics cards to use DirectX 12;

“To get the full benefits of DX12, the answer is yes,” “There will be DX 11 cards that take advantage of a lot of the driver and software tech that we’re bringing in Windows 10, but if you want the full benefits of DX12, you’re going to need a DX12 card.“

AMD have said that “All GCN-based graphics cards from AMD are going to support DirectX12”, which at this time we assume to mean fully support, but this remains unconfirmed.

This means that only 40% of AMD's DirectX 11 lineup will be able to support DirectX 12, but we must remember that only 3 Nvidia GPUs support DirectX 12 fully (The currently available GTX 9XX series) and that no Nvidia GPUs support AMD's Mantle API.

AMD seems to be pushing the fact that GCN means DirectX 12 and Mantle support, so AMD is the only place that right now supports both low level API's.

When it comes to Intel Graphics, all we know is that Intel’s 4th generation Haswell (and newer) Core processors will support DirectX 12.

DirectX 12 promises far greater performance than DirectX 11, thanks to a reduced CPU usage and a better threading model allowing much more to be done with a lower power consumption. These benefits are very similar to what we have already seen on AMD's Mantle API.

We certainly look forward to seeing more games use lower level API's as they will allow developers to do more with less, which will be to the delight of everyone, especially for budget PC users.

You can join the discussion on DirectX 12's hardware requirements on the OC3D Forums.

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