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Windows 10 will ship with DirectX 12

The Unreal Landscape Mountains demo. Shiny.

Microsoft committed a crime against chronology the other day by rechristening Windows 9 as Windows 10. It’s a nice, round number for an OS all-rounder – the platform intended to unite big business, tile converts and the Windows 7 faithful.

It’ll launch with DirectX 12 – and Microsoft’s dev team have already rolled out some “treats for game developers”.

The DirectX team are currently working with early testers on the Windows 10 technical preview released this week.

“The final version of Windows 10 will ship with DirectX 12,” they wrote, “and we think it’s going to be awesome.”

The latest version of Unreal 4 Engine already supports DirectX 12 – and game developers involved in Microsoft’s early access program are starting to play around with it.

“In the comments section of our last blog post, several of you asked about support for other graphics vendors,” said the DirectX dev team. “We have great working relationships with all graphics vendors and you can expect to see a continual showcase of their progress.”

Intel, for one, have optimised their driver for DirectX 12, and have shown off performance and power saving improvements in a specially-made Asteroids demo. That’s also available for developers to tinker with in early access.

Intel have previously called DirectX 12 the “most significant leap in Windows Graphics in many years”. The image above, incidentally, is a screenshot from an Intel Haswell graphics DX12 machine running UE4.4’s Landscape Mountains demo.

In short, DirectX 12 is going to be standard from the moment Windows 10 launches in late 2015 – and game devs and graphics manufacturers alike are already poking at it to see what makes it tick. Good news, yeah?