Frostbite Technical Director, Johan Andersson, has taken to Twitter to voice his yearning for Microsoft's DirectX 12 to become the minimum spec in EA/Frostbite games. Frostbite is a powerful graphics engine behind games such as Battlefield and Dragon's Age: Inquisition but could offer so much more with a minimum user spec of Windows 10, DirectX 12 and WDDM 2.0.
Would like to require Win10 & DX12/WDDM2.0 as a minspec for our holiday 2016 games on Frostbite, likely a bit aggressive but major benefits
— Johan Andersson (@repi) April 7, 2015
By his own admission Andersson thinks that a goal of holiday 2016 for all Frostbite games to require DX12 and WDDM 2.0 is a bit "aggressive", and we might call his hopes optimistic. However the "major benefits," gamers could experience from the modern graphics API and memory management are obvious to him. Jacob Freeman from EVGA chirped in to say that the holiday 2016 timescale isn't such a fanciful idea as "Win10 will be free and DX12 capable cards have a pretty large install base, so seems like good timing".
In follow-up Tweets by Andersson, pondering the future, he thought that "the Win10 adoption within core gamers will be _really_ quite fast, and Microsoft is helping with their upgrade program". However it is still uncertain whether Microsoft will achieve the every-other-version of Windows rip-roaring success with the imminent Windows 10, even though it is to be free for Windows 7 (and newer) owners.
The Frostbite engine was last seen in Dragon Age Inquistion and Andersson hinted that there have been some significant upgrades to the engine in the meantime. We should get our first peek at its progress in a week's time, at the Star Wars Celebration event, where Star Wars Battlefront gameplay should be seen. Frostbite is also going to be the engine behind the upcoming Mass Effect 4, expected to be released within a year from now.
