Microsoft has prepared a small teaser on their website in which they make note of DirectX 12 being announced March 20. So lte me just say, heck yeah finally ! This will happen at the game developers conference in San Francisco. Microsoft will host two conferences called 'DirectX: Evolving Microsoft's Graphics Platform'  and 'DirectX: Direct3D Futures'. On MSDN Microsoft now also announced DX 12.

“Driver overhead has been a frustrating reality for game developers for the entire life of the PC game industry. On desktop systems, driver overhead can decrease frame rate, while on mobile devices driver overhead is more insidious–robbing both battery life and frame rate. In this unprecedented sponsored session, Graham Sellers (AMD), Tim Foley (Intel), Cass Everitt (NVIDIA) and John McDonald (NVIDIA) will present high-level concepts available in today’s OpenGL implementations that radically reduce driver overhead–by up to 10x or more. The techniques presented will apply to all major vendors and are suitable for use across multiple platforms. Additionally, they will demonstrate practical demos of the techniques in action in an extensible, open source comparison framework.”

From the looks of it (think mantle here) the earlier rumors on low-level access and control over hardware have been true. This will be a major feature of DX12 and will lower CPU overhead and thus cycles. Anyway, March 20th we'll learn more about the up and coming DX12. let's just hope you are not forced to upgrade to a new version of Windows to be able to use it.

Microsoft will announce DirectX 12 March 20