A form of DirectX 12 has been released for gaming on Windows 7
Microsoft posted an update on their DirectX Blog to let everyone know that they’ve brought a form of DirectX 12 to Windows 7. They’ve brought this latest DX12 version to Windows 7 for World of Warcraft.
This was a response to single-threaded CPU performance plateauing, which makes complex graphical workloads increasingly CPU-bound. This latest DirectX API removes some of the CPU bottlenecks for gaming by allowing developers to use low-level programming conventions to shift some of the pressure points away from the CPU.
Since Microsoft had made the decision long ago to only support DirectX 12 on Windows 10, this announcement came as a big surprise.
Their timing is also a bit unusual, as support for Windows 7 is set to end on January 14, 2020. That date is not even a year away at this point, and Microsoft has been actively trying to migrate users to Windows 10 to avoid having loads of Windows 7 users with unpatched systems.
As stated previously, this DX12 on Windows 7 is currently only enabled for World of Warcraft. That being said, Windows has also stated that they are working with a few other developers to bring their DX12 games/backends to Windows 7 as well.
So, if you play World of Warcraft on Windows 7, enjoy. If you use an NVIDIA GPU, you’ll only need the latest Game Ready Drivers to enjoy DirectX 12.
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