DirectX 12 Confirmed As A Windows 10 Exclusive, Gamers May Require New GPU

There’s been a lot of entirely justifiable hyper surrounding DX12 recently. The powerful new API is however, tied exclusively to Windows 10 as announced very recently. While this is fantastic news for Windows lovers and Microsoft themselves, it does put some gamers that want to utilize it in a bit of a pickle.

Some gamers may need to upgrade to a new Graphics Card if they want to make use of DX12, but the official DirectX 12 Twitter feed today posted a comment saying, “>50% of gamers today have DX12-capable hardware. We’re super excited to bring them all to Win10 and DX12 – 1 yr free upgrade for Win7, 8.1!”

Just in case you don’t know, “>50%” means more than half. It would seem that a good deal of DX12 functions are tied to hardware as well. Nvidia made it clear, in response to a concerned user, that “DirectX 12 is coming to all Fermi, Kepler, and Maxwell GPUs – so your GTX Titan is compatible!”

AMD, Nvidia’s objectively lesser counterpart, are yet to comment on which tiers of their hardware will support DX12 meaning that some users may need to upgrade their hardware. They did however say “You don’t throw your screwdriver away because you currently need a wrench.”