Microsoft officially announced DirectX 12 last week at the Game Developers Conference, and said the upcoming revamp of their graphics API would work on a lot of hardware that"s already available, such as the Xbox One game console, along with many current NVIDIA and AMD GPUs for the PC. However, the first games that will fully support DirectX 12 won"t be released until "holiday 2015".
That means both NVIDIA and AMD will be releasing new graphics chips in their GeForce and Radeon lines, respectively, between now and when DirectX 12 is launched. The Tech Report got a chance to chat with NVIDIA spokesperson Tony Tamasi, who said that while DirectX 12 will add things like lower-level abstraction to current graphics hardware, it will also include a number of features that will only be supported on future GPUs.
Two of them are new blend modes and "conservative rasterization", which will help improve hit detection in games. However, Tamasi indicated that Microsoft has a number of other unannounced DirectX 12 features that will also only work on upcoming GPU hardware.
In the meantime, the company is already accepting sign ups from developers to participate in a DirectX 12 early access program, with a preview version of the API scheduled to be released later this year.
Source: The Tech Report | Image via Microsoft