All this amazing API new today has me VERY happy as a PC gamer.

Also pretty stoked hearing how super cheap Cryengine and Unreal 4 are. These kinds of things are going to usher in a new era of cheap to make, beautiful games.

GDC 2014 had literally been fantastic.

Since when is an i3 + 7870 crappy?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cokiEkxY2xI

I think this DX12 announcement is more a response to AMD's Mantle API.

Not that I am an expert when it comes to API's but the PS4 Open GL is specific to it's hardware already (as is the X1 as well to some degree) and apparently there is a lower level API to bypass a lot of it. From some article I spotted at Eurogamer:

"One of them is the absolute low-level API, you're talking directly to the hardware. It's used to draw the static RAM buffers and feed them directly to the GPU," Norden shared. "It's much, much lower level than you're used to with DirectX or OpenGL but it's not quite at the driver level. It's very similar if you've programmed PS3 or PS Vita, very similar to those graphics libraries."

But on top of that Sony is also providing what it terms a "wrapper API" that more closely resembles the standard PC rendering APIs.

"The key is that it doesn't sacrifice the efficiency of the low-level API. It's actually a wrapper on top of the low-level API that does a lot of the mundane tasks that you don't want to have to do over and over."

Operation Locker, dat chokepoint >_>

I have a 3.6GHz 4100 FX which is basically an i3 and a Saphirre 7870HD and I've had no problems with any games thus far either. The barrier for entry in  PC gaming has never been lower :)

DX12 + Mantle + GL14 makes things even better.

PS4 offers OpenGL but AFAIK that will only be used for x-platform games where performance isn't crucial, e.g. indies, or possibly for parts of the rendering pipeline where OpenGL is just more convenient and already fast enough... therefore having a speed-up to OpenGL is just not relevant to AAA games. MAAAYBE it could expand the amount of work that can be done via OpenGL with less down-and-dirty GNM Sony API work, thusly making development easier and freeing resources for other things, but that code isn't really going to be faster than what GNM could accomplish. This is exactly why AMD themself say Mantle is irrelevant to PS4, it's native API already allows what Mantle does.

Isn't the i3 still quite a bit better than a Jaguar? Also, I could've sworn that the ps4 GPU was basically a 7870m, which would be closer in performance to a 7850...

WiiU also uses OpenGL!

*gets shot*

*burns corpse*

So it's 7 - 15x if developer tunes the code versus an untuned equivalent DirectX thing? How about Tuned vs Tuned?
(I don't have time to red the thing.)

opengl & mantle > direct x