Microsoft does say that DX12 will offer more features on Windows 10, which makes sense since the graphics stack was designed for it right from the start, but if you do play World of Warcraft on Windows 7, you’re going to get a free performance boost. As a consumer it’s great to see them supporting their product ten years after it launched, but with the entire OS being put out to pasture in nine months, it seems like an odd time to be dedicating resources to bringing it new features. Instead, Microsoft has stated that they are working with a few other developers to bring their DX12 games/backends to Windows 7 as well.
Now before you get too excited, this is currently only enabled for World of Warcraft and indeed it's not slated to be a general-purpose solution like DX12 on Win10. So adding a big feature like DX12 now not only risks undermining their own efforts to migrate people away from Windows 7, but also adding a new feature well after Windows 7 entered long-term support. In fact, they are about to add a pop-up notification to Windows 7 to let users know that they are running out of support very soon. As it is, even free security patches for Windows 7 are set to end on January 14, 2020, which is well under a year away, and the company is actively trying to migrate users to Windows 10 to avoid having a huge swath of machines sitting in an unpatched state. If Microsoft had wanted to back-port DX12 to Windows 7, you would have thought they’d have done it before Windows 7 entered its long-term servicing state. Today’s announcement is a pretty big surprise on a number of levels.
#How to download directx 12 for windows 7 driver#
But, Microsoft made the decision long ago to only support DirectX 12 on Windows 10, with its WDDM 2.0 driver stack.
There’s many advantages to using this API over traditional DX11, especially for threading and draw calls. This was a response to single-threaded CPU performance plateauing, making complex graphical workloads increasingly CPU-bounded. Where do we even begin?įor some background, Microsoft’s latest DirectX API was created to remove some of the CPU bottlenecks for gaming by allowing for developers to use low-level programming conventions to shift some of the pressure points away from the CPU.
#How to download directx 12 for windows 7 update#
In a far less fictional event, Microsoft has posted an update on their DirectX Blog announcing that they’ve brought a form of DirectX 12 to Windows 7, via official support for the latest DX12 version of World of Warcraft on Windows 7. Sometimes things happen that are unexpected – just ask Ned Stark.
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