It took a bit long but the users of older Nvidia graphics cards have finally got the DirectX 12 API. Fermi based cards got lucky with the latest driver update and Nvidia rolled out the new capabilities that were much asked for by the users who are still on the older gen cards.
The company had announced that it will bring DirectX 12 to Fermi cards back in 2015 but till date, there was no update released that included the API. The recently released graphics driver Nvidia GeForce 384.76 driver brought DirectX 12 API for the older graphics cards.
Fermi was the codename used for the graphics cards released back in 2010 under the GTX 400 and GTX 500 series. Fermi was the successor to Tesla architecture and it found a place in the entry level GTX 600 series graphics cards too. These several generations old graphics card will now be able to support newer games that support DirectX 12 but their graphics capabilities won’t be enough to handle most of them.
Nvidia chose not to reveal the major change in the release notes of the driver and we wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t for the people using Guru3D forums. The DirectX 12 support in the GeForce 384 driver was first noticed by the users there.
The update rolled out is targeted at all the users of the Fermi based cards and includes DirectX 12 API for Direct 3D feature-level 12_0 games and applications, and it also completes the WDDM 2.2 compliance for the Fermi graphics cards on Windows 10 Creators Update 1703.
Released in 2010, the GTX 400 series is more than seven years old and isn’t even supported by many of the modern computers. There aren’t many using the graphics card from the series but still, Nvidia brought the latest API to the card. However, the release of the update took longer than expected. The update was also necessary for allowing the users to install the Windows 10 Creators Update on a machine using these older gen cards.
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