DirectX 12 Requires New Graphics Cards to Utilize All Features
Last week both AMD and NVIDIA were making the media rounds with the welcome news that Microsoft’s latest DirectX would be supported by current generation graphics cards. AMD has stated anything with their GCN architecture has native support for DX12 and any series released after NVIDIA’s Fermi architecture will have support the API as well. Today though we learned these graphics cards will have only limited support for the API, with key elements missing.
According to TweakTown current generation graphics cards will not be able to use the new blend modes and conservative rasterization features. In order to use these features you will have to upgrade to AMD’s Radeon Rx 300 series, or NVIDIA’s second generation Maxwell architecture. Luckily DX12 will not hit the market until 2015, so there’s plenty of time to get the necessary hardware before DX12 is on the market, but if you were planning on having a long upgrade cycle you will be missing some features.
What version of Windows is necessary to run the API is another area of debate, but we do know Microsoft is at least looking into Windows 7 support.









