14 DAY TRIAL // With great fanfare, ASUS has trumpeted today that its ASUS Z97-A and TUF Trooper B85 motherboards have just passed Microsoft's Windows Hardware Quality labs certification for the much-announced Windows 10.
This is indeed good news for gamers around the world as the two motherboards from ASUS are built for performance gaming, being compatible for the first time with the new DirectX 12 API resource management. ASUS also claims that the latest certification from Microsoft will guarantee that a wide range of Intel and AMD chipset motherboards will be compatible with the new OS, thus gaining a serious advantage ahead of other manufacturers.
Chipsets from Intel, like the X79 and X99, have been announced as compatible, and alongside AMD's 990FX and A88X, they bring together the best of the both worlds of Intel and AMD under the one roof of DirectX 12. It is most likely that ASUS' Z170 chipset-based motherboards will follow suit soon, as the mentioned motherboards have only current-gen X99 and X97 chipsets based on the LGA 1150 socket that came with late-generation Haswells.
DirectX 12 pedal to the metal
The DirectX 12 API management will be vastly superior to DirectX 11, as this time developers will be allowed to "touch the metal" of GPU and CPU resources, compared to the hard-coded software limitations that previous DirectX iterations received from Microsoft. This proves the larger plan that Microsoft has for its PC industry to turn it into a major entertainment platform that would rival its console market.
The news is indeed much welcomed as ASUS is clearly in the frontline of PC MLG gaming by providing top-of-the-line performance products like the ASUS Z97-A and TUF Trooper B85. Being the first to be granted this precious certificate will clearly grant the company a major head start against rivals like MSI and Gigabyte, who also compete for the same performance gaming market.
However, the real change of pace in overall chipset performance will come this autumn with the launch of Intel's next-gen Skylake CPUs, which will unleash the raw power of Intel's next great "tock" on every PC worldwide. Combine that with the freedom that DirectX 12 will give to developers, Intel's Z170 chipset arrival, and Nvidia's + AMD's new stacked memory technology, and it will indeed usher in a new era of performance PCs that will last us a couple of years onwards.