For all the talk from AMD about Mantle being revolutionary for game developers and consumers, for a while it seemed to be forgotten that AMD doesn’t have a monopoly on the competitive advantage Mantle promises. DirectX, with its near universal adoption amongst developers, is fully capable of offering the low overhead and close to the metal programming environment that Mantle promises. Earlier this month at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver Microsoft proved just that, running DirectX 12 on an Intel-powered Surface Pro 3. During the benchmarks displayed at Intel’s booth on the show floor, DirectX 12 provided a fairly serious performance gains over the previous version. Last week