So this is good news. DirectX 12 has been announced! I guess a few people have seen this coming with the competition in the GPU API market heating up with the announcement of Mantle and the looks of talks to be given at GDC this year surrounding that.

For us in graphics programming I am glad to see a response from Microsoft, the last thing I want is to be writing render code on the game for one vendor then having to redo the work again for other vendor. I couldn't think of anything that could hurt AAA PC game development more. Although (the oddly named) GSync (I guess someone beat them to putting N on the front of everything...) looks like it is going to have go at it to some extent to make the barrier to entry more complicated for the casual user looking to step in.

Still, with all that being said, I am still looking forward to see what Mantle can do.