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Sometimes unexpected things happen – just ask Ned Stark. In a much less fictional event, Microsoft released an update on its blog DirectX, announcing that it had brought a form of DirectX 12 to Windows 7, via the official support of the latest version DX12 of World of Warcraft on Windows 7 . Where are we? even start?
As a reminder, the latest Microsoft DirectX API was created to remove some bottlenecks from the CPU by allowing developers to use low-level programming conventions to move some of the processor's pressure points. This responded to the performance of a single-threaded processor, which made complex graphics workloads more and more processor-related. The use of this API over the traditional DX11 has many advantages, especially for threading and calling. However, Microsoft made the decision long ago to only support DirectX 12 under Windows 10, with its WDDM 2.0 driver stack.
Today's announcement is a very big surprise on many levels. If Microsoft had wanted to transfer the DX12 to Windows 7, you would have thought to do it before Windows 7 entered the state of service in the long run. As it stands, even the free Windows 7 security patches will end on January 14, 2020, less than a year from now, and the company is actively trying to migrate users to Windows 10 to avoid multitude of machines waiting. in an uncorrected state. In fact, they are about to add a contextual notification to Windows 7 to inform users that they will no longer have technical support very soon. Therefore, adding a major feature, such as DX12, may not only undermine the efforts they are deploying to migrate Windows 7 users, but also add a new feature long after Windows 7 has entered in long-term charge. It's just weird.
Now, before being too excited, this is currently enabled only for World of Warcraft; and indeed, it is not expected that this is a versatile solution like DX12 on Win10. Instead, Microsoft said it was working with a few other developers to also bring their DX12 games / backends to Windows 7. As a consumer, it's great to see them take charge of their product ten years after launch, but with the entire farming system being grazed in nine months, it seems time to devote resources to bringing new features.
Microsoft claims that DX12 will offer more features on Windows 10, which is logical since the stack of graphics was designed from the beginning, but if you play World of Warcraft on Windows 7, you will get a free performance. to reinforce. You may still want to consider getting out of Windows 7 soon, as this will not reset the January 2020 end-of-game date for gamers.
For Blizzard, the publisher of World of Warcraft, it's a huge gain for their developers, as they will no longer need to maintain two versions of the game.
Overall, this is an unexpected and rather exceptional event for the status of Windows Graphical APIs. And after contacting an expert to comment on Microsoft's announcement, they seem to be in agreement:
"It's a big deal" – Ryan Smith, Editor-in-Chief of AnandTech
They may also be working on Continuum updates and Windows Store for Windows 7. They are nine months after all.
We contacted AMD and NVIDIA to see if there are any specific driver versions required. NVIDIA responded by informing us that Windows 7 users will only need the latest Game Ready driver for this.
Source: Microsoft DirectX Blog
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