I realize that the quality of games on smarthpones are getting better but what would really help mobile gaming is making a gamepad extension to mobile phones but until the size of the phones become standardized we won't have that. We can't have phones with different sizes just floating around otherwise the new peripheral won't work with every phone. 

If microsoft DOES come out with a gamepad extension for phones then I'll be greatly considering getting a windows phone just for portable gaming purposes.

Another thing that they can do to take it to the next level is supporting CLOUD GMING on phones. This WOULD make the Nvidia Shield ENTIRELY IRRELEVANT. 

The problem with phones is that they are simply to weak to play the most graphically intensive games such as Crysis 3 or meto last light but having the 4G connection to streaming the game to my phone while my gaming rig (Or even your xbox one!) is the one rendering the game would be awesome.

No they'll start shipping in Q4 next year.

And why is anyone even remotly surprised bythat? This is GDC not E3.  Project Morpheus won't be out till sometime in 2015 at the earliest as well.

Everything being announced at GDC is years away.  It's like that every year. GDC's whole purpose is to get the development communitys support on new hardware, software, API's, OS's, etc. This event isn't targeted at consumers. Dev teams will need time to actually develop games for DX12, if they announced DX12 came out tomorrow it would mean litteraly nothing as zero games have been developed for it.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

DX12, like Mantle, essentially ONLY shines when you have a weak cpu and a strong gpu. In that case, all the no-longer needed command-talking between cpu and gpu will greatly increase the time the cpu can use to "make esach frame prettier and/or make more frames/s". When you have a weak gpu, DX12 is no help since the gpu simply cannot work through all the "make it prettier/more" part. Equally when you have a very strong cpu/gpu combo, you probably already reach enough fps and pretty frames.

The critical part is an average cpu/gpu combination like in the consoles (X1's gpu moreso than PS4's gpu). We don't know if the X1 cpu can already choke the gpu or not (but given the 1080p problems, it seems not unlikely as there are no complaints around about "not enough cpu power"). If yes, then progress can only come from trickier uses of the esram, not from DX12.

The X1 does not use DirectX, it already uses a Mantle-like interface with direct hardware access.

Agreed. However, it's possible that many launch-era XB1 titles didn't take great advantage of the already low-level API offered in the final pre-launch XB1 dev kit, simply due to not having enough time. So we can think of those as sort of sloppy ports to the hardware, as fast as possible, just to meet deadlines.

While DX11 vs. DX12 won't make much difference on XB1, what will make a fairly decent positive difference is a dev starting work on a title with final hardware in hand, working through it through the entire process, having all of the optimizations testable with final hardware at any point along the way, etc. Improved tools in the new SDK should help as well.

As opposed to how the launch titles were made, which was something like : here's a high end PC, and 'target' specs, now go make a game, we'll come back to you when the final hardware is ready and work with you in getting it ported to final hardware. IOW, a port vs. a natively written game from start to finish on a mature SDK and known hardware specs.

And of course, all of this would have been the same had there not even been a DX12 XB1 announcement. DX12 is not that meaningful for XB1 at all. But yeah, for PC it's a huge deal, as DX11 on PC did not in any way allow for low-level API draw call optimization, which is the 9,000lb monster that holds GPUs back.

Thanks for the level headed comment, instead of shouting out 50% increase!

Steam Box will kill itself lol!

Yea I think eventually smarphones will take over everything including PC's. I imagine a day when all we will be doing is docking our phones everywhere we go. SImilar to how we do laptops now.

Actually yes this is quite a huge blow to Valves whole Steambox / Steam OS gameplan. One of the big selling points of Steam OS was essentially turning PC's into a console like environment to take strain off of hardware.  DX12 is doing exactly that and looking at some of the slides on how it optimizes across CPU cores and actually can free up GPU processing I don't see too much reason to ever have Steam OS.  And I LOVE me some Steam.

Honestly I'm pretty confused why Steam is even doing the whole Steam OS / Steambox gameplan. It really makes very little sense.

That would be cool, but the real world marketplace in 4G/LTE basically precludes that from a practical perspective today. The big cell companies have all but killed truly unlimited 4G, and the fastest LTE networks like Verizon charge a ludicrous amount of money for the priveledge on a 'more you use, more you pay' scale.

The real problem is that the explosion of smartphones wasn't really taken into account by the FCC and governing bodies, so the frequencies we have out there in combination with wireless network infrastructure cannot support a large number of customers using 4G/LTE (and beyond) willy-nilly. It's a distinctly premium service.

For that reason, streaming HD games over 4G is unlikely to be reasonably supportable. Hell, it's only barely possible with wired connections of decent low-latency+high bandwidth in limited urban marketplaces as is.