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Been following Cyril's tweets about DX12 (thanks for the retweets Scott) and it's looking like this really is a release just to counter Mantle. So far they say they will support everything Microsoft from Xbox One, PCs, to phones. That last part seems to be something new but worthwhile to help people easily port from PCs to phones (good for Indie developers.) Then we see that AMD and Intel claim their current products will support DX12 at release time. I would assume that Nvidia will also do the same. That suggests that we aren't going to get anything special in DX12 that requires new hardware else AMD and Intel couldn't fully support the DX12 API at release time.

So it seems that AMD/Valve really did get Microsoft to move and address many of the issues that they and many developers have with the current Direct X. This seems like a good thing for all of us.

the dx api should have been updated with a major update long time ago

Yes, Nvidia also claimed that their current DX11 hardware will also support DX12. There were multiple slides during presentation, with claims of reduced overhead and even better multithreading optimizations, etc. They even provided some sample numbers:
http://i.imgur.com/8hW1mKd.jpg
Image was copied from PCper's live blog - you can re-read it for more details: http://www.pcper.com/live/

JohnC wrote:

Yes, Nvidia also claimed that their current DX11 hardware will also support DX12. There were multiple slides during presentation, with claims of reduced overhead and even better multithreading optimizations, etc. They even provided some sample numbers:
http://i.imgur.com/8hW1mKd.jpg
Image was copied from PCper's live blog - you can re-read it for more details: http://www.pcper.com/live/

Those numbers are pretty convincing... This is looking more and more like a solid and necessary DX update.

I was particularly hoping for improvements on DirectCompute but nothing was mentioned. For example, DX11 lacks dynamic parallelism as seen in CUDA and OpenCL 2.0. So far it looks like DX12 was focused solely on graphics.

As for current hardware support, it may very well be a "feature level" type of scheme similar to DIrectX 11. In DirectX 11, runtime is separated from the "feature level" so you can have DX9 GPUs supporting DX11 runtime and APIs, just with a declared feature level of say 9_3 so some features may be disabled but at least programmers can target a wide variety of hardware with less effort. They have announced that DX11 hardware will support DX12 but that does not mean everything will be necessarily supported in current hardware. However, it is not clear if there will be a new feature level called say 12_0 for DX12 and what, if anything, it will bring.

Microsoft dodged to confirm/denie the lack of windows7 support... wonder why, unless they are on the fence ?

But they only expect 50% of PC in 2015 to be able to run the DX12 API, thats very telling.

So good recap:

dx9 in 2002
dx10 in 2006
dx11 in 2009
dx12 in late 2015

Microsoft posted all details on their own blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/directx/archive ... tx-12.aspx
You can also ask questions there... Of course, it's highly unlikely that any of them will be answered.

About bloody time they implemented real load balancing for the graphics driver.

I'm surprised/impressed that DX12 will be backwards compatible with almost everything that's been on the market for awhile. Makes for a refreshing change.

Sschaem, they won't refuse to update WIn 7 to DX12. With XP finally out of the picture Microsoft isn't going to shaft the vast majority of its install base, the uproar would be large enough to make them reverse course even if they tried.