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Microsoft has responded to the challenge laid down by AMD's Mantle, today revealing the first work on its new DirectX 12 API. PCs, tablets, smartphones and Xbox One will all benefit from the new technology, which promises to free up CPU resources while offering developers lower-level access and more control of graphics hardware. To demonstrate the cross-platform nature of DirectX 12, Forza Motorsport 5 was shown running on PC featuring an Nvidia graphics card.While the broad feature-set of DX12 looks very much like a response to the Mantle initiative, Nvidia claims that it began discussions with Microsoft on the subject four years ago, with direct work on the API starting last year. Nvidia itself has provided an initial driver to allow developers to get to grips with the new technology. In theory, any DX11 graphics card should work with DX12 - Nvidia itself has confirmed that anything from the "Fermi" 400 series onwards should work.
The Forza 5 demo was the star of the presentation, designed to show how console-level efficiency is possible on the PC. Bizarrely, according to Nvidia, the demo ran on Titan Black hardware - the most powerful single-chip graphics card on the market, and possibly not quite the best hardware to demonstrate an efficient console port. According to Turn 10, the conversion from Xbox One's DX11.x API to an alpha version of DX12 took four man-months to achieve, with some features of the existing console API migrating across to PC, while other elements (thanks PC Perspective for the shot) - such as "pipeline state objects" and the "resource binding model" will make their way across to Xbox One.
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