While the console wars between Microsoft and Sony get more headlines, there is also a smaller but just as heated skirmish going on when it comes to the graphics cards that are being used in a number of devices. This particular fight is going on between AMD and Nvidia and if AMD’s Robert Hallock can be believed, it appears that his company is winning that fight right now and moving forward. According to Hallock, who is the Global Technical Marketing director for AMD a vast majority of titles using DX12 are using or are going to be using AMD in 2015 and 2016.

The exec engaged in a Reddit thread where he wrote, “You will find that the vast majority of DX12 titles in 2015/2016 are partnering with AMD. Mantle taught the development world how to work with a low-level API, the consoles use AMD and low-level APIs, and now those seeds are bearing fruit.” This comment is especially interesting considering that Microsoft has been rumored to be looking at purchasing AMD. If the company is having as much success as Hallock claims in getting its tech into a massive number of products, it would seemingly make the firm that much more attractive to Microsoft.

It seems unlikely that an announcement like the one Hallock made means AMD is beating up its competitors as much as he would like consumers to think. Just like the fight between Microsoft and Sony, the two companies tend to land haymakers against each other every now and then. Both companies are usually able to get off the mat eventually. We’ll just have to see how much this pronouncement changes the game.

DirectX 12. Get used to seeing that splashed everywhere in the coming months, because if the reports are to be believed, it’s going to have a massive impact for PC games development. 3DMark, the extremely popular cross platform benchmark, released  DX12 Vs DX11 Vs Mantle benchmarking software. PC World then picked it up and ran with it. The final results were far better than what many had predicted.

During their tests, PC World found that the AMD R9 290X saw a speed of 1300% in 3DMark’s API test, with Mantle scoring 1200% over the DX11 API test score. The DX12 API score however, takes the lead by a considerable margin. PC World also went ahead and swapped out the R9 290X for Nvidia’s beefy GTX Titan X and found that the two ran almost identically, despite Nvidia’s GTX Titan X costing nearly three times as much as the R9.

Intel’s Iris Pro Integrated GPU saw a boost in performance of X4 and the test revealed that Intel’s Quad Core CPUs (with Hyper Threading on) gave the fastest performance, with a noticeable difference in the DX12 Multi Threaded tests. Obviously, this is all fantastic stuff. But this is a benchmark, real world results are likely to vary from machine to machine. But all said, this is good news.

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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.”