AMD Clarifies Direct X 11.2 Will Be Supported By HD 7000 Series

A few days ago we brought you the news that AMD’s HD 7000 series wouldn’t support Direct X 11.2, at least not straight away, due to driver issues. The story apparently had some truth in it but AMD have told us that a driver fix will be available for HD 7000 and HD 8000 OEM series graphics cards that fixes the minor problem. The official statement given by AMD reads as follows:

“The AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 series hardware architecture is fully DirectX® 11.2-capable when used with a driver that enables this feature.  AMD is planning to enable DirectX 11.2 with a driver update in the Windows® 8.1 launch timeframe in October, when DirectX® 11.2 ships.  Today, AMD is the only GPU manufacturer to offer fully-compatible DirectX 11.1 support, and the only manufacturer to support Tiled Resources Tier-2 within a shipping product stack.”

So HD 7000 users will be able to get support for full Direct X 11.2 and its expanded feature set. Of course you have to use Windows 8.1 to gain access to that because Windows 8 and Windows 7 will not support it. However, this type of Direct X “exclusivity” is typical of Microsoft, currently you have to use Windows 8 to gain access to the latest Direct X which is 11.1. The key thing to note is that you should keep an eye on driver updates within the first month of Windows 8.1 launching to get AMD’s latest Direct X 11.2-enabled catalyst driver.

Image courtesy of AMD