Remember how Microsoft told everyone how DirectX 12 wouldn't be coming to Windows 7, and that one of the main benefits of upgrading to Windows 10 was access to the faster, more powerful low-level DirectX 12?

Well, that used to be the case. But then someone at Microsoft changed their mind, and found a way to get DX12 going in Windows 7 after all.

If you've been waiting to take advantage of the real-time ray tracing effects on your flashy new RTX graphics cards, good news: as of today games will be able to officially take advantage of them. Slightly less good news: only one game so far can actually do that.

It's still very early days for DirectX 12 and Vulkan, the main graphics APIs fighting for superiority. It's not quite Blu-ray versus HD-DVD; even if one does pull ahead with developers, the other won't suddenly vanish. A lot of factors can decide the battle, with one of the more interesting being support for mixed hardware, multi-GPU setups. On this front, Microsoft scored points with DirectX 12, but Vulkan has done one better by supporting multi-GPU on all the important platforms, not just Windows 10.

The last few months saw the release of grunty video hardware from major GPU vendors NVIDIA and AMD. The only problem has been finding games to help stretch their legs. Well, Eidos Montreal has just added Deus Ex: Mankind Divided to the growing list of games with DirectX 12 support, though its implementation is currently an opt-in "preview".

The 3D Mark suite has become a staple in the tech world as a synthetic benchmark for CPUs, graphics cards, hard drives, laptops, mobiles and even for the most basic of computers. But until today, 3DMark hasn't had a DirectX 12 specific test.

Rise of the Tomb Raider has had a steady stream of updates since it hit Steam in February, with the fifth patch released just yesterday. However, along with the expected packet of fixes and tweaks, it introduced DirectX 12 support for the rather gorgeous title.

If you haven't messed around with Dolphin, an emulator constantly refined and tweaked by a massive community of contributors, then you should find some time tonight to play around with it. It's a superb program; it might even be the most impressive emulator released to date.

Dolphin's just got one of its biggest upgrades to date, however. The team behind the emulator has just added a DirectX 12 renderer to one of their experimental releases, and the gains are huge.

If I said the words Ashes of the Singularity, some of you might be aware that it's an upcoming RTS from the stables of Oxide Games and Stardock Entertainment. Others might not know what I'm referring to at all. And some might not care just because it's a strategy.

There is a very good reason why every PC gamer should have at least one eye on Ashes. It's a game that quickly became the go-to benchmark for DirectX 12, even in primitive builds. And as of it's finally entered beta, with a string of crucial features.

The onslaught of new 3D APIs, including Metal, Vulkan and Direct3D 12 is busting preconceptions along with performance barriers. This time around it's Microsoft's contender, showing that you'll not only be able to run mixed GPUs in a quasi-SLI / Crossfire configuration, but they can run faster than single vendor setups.

One of the interesting advancements in DirectX 12 is the way it allows graphics cards from different manufacturers to be paired together. Traditionally if you wanted a multiple GPU setup, you had to get two cards from the same manufacturer and often they had to be the same model too.

But DX12 is giving developers much more control over accessing and manipulating GPUs, and one manifestation is the freedom to pair different GPUs. It will still take a few years before the real-world benefits become much more commonplace, but the first benchmarks are in and the results are highly intriguing.

The next few years are going to be interesting for 3D graphics APIs. With Microsoft's DirectX 12 (or more accurately, Direct3D 12) and Khronos' Vulkan on the horizon, both offering lower driver overhead and "to the metal" access to hardware, developers will have more headroom than ever to build resplendent (and hopefully fun) games. Which API will prove the most popular? Valve reckons Vulkan is the way to go, if only because it's multi-platform.

AMD has been well behind NVIDIA in the last couple of years, but that might be about to change if these DirectX 12 benchmarks hold up.

You guys remember Mantle, right? It was AMD's effort to inject life into what was once a languishing area of improvement: 3D graphics APIs, the software that powers modern, real-time 3D. However, it appears the company is shelving its creation a mere two years after its inception.

We can all agree Slightly Mad Studios' Project CARS is visually stunning. Graphics that impressive however don't come cheap and while the game runs well enough on consoles, it's hard to say no to free frames. In the case of the Xbox One, will the DirectX 12 update provide that boost?

Square Enix teamed up with Microsoft to show what the upcoming DirectX 12 can do. How does 63 million polygons per scene sound? It sounds like a lot!

DirectX 12 should be one of the more exciting updates to Microsoft's multimedia API since DirectX 9. Along with vastly reduced CPU overhead and a focus on giving developers more control, it might be possible to mix GPUs from different vendors in the same machine, if recent rumours are to be believed.

Yes, of course that's what Phil Spencer, Microsoft's head of Xbox would say in a fluff video promoting the company's latest console and upcoming operating system. The thing is, Windows 10 has to be a better deal for gamers, given the mess that Vista was (despite the inclusion of DirectX 10) and the unpalatable, though improved, experience of Windows 8 / 8.1.

It goes without saying that Intel is unanimously on-board with Direct3D 12, the next revision of Microsoft's graphics API destined for release in the latter half of 2015. Until then, we won't see benchmarks from the enthusiast sites, so we'll have to be happy with numbers from Redmond itself or, in this case, chip maker Intel.

Pre-2010, the antics of NVIDIA and AMD (or ATI back then) was one of PC gaming's biggest topics, but in recent years the "rivalry", as it were, largely went off the boil. And then AMD released Mantle, a lean 3D graphics API and competitor to Direct3D and OpenGL and suddenly, it was on again. Now the two companies exchange barbs on a regular basis, with NVIDIA providing the latest salvo.