Wednesday, March 13th 2019
DirectX 12 Makes Windows 7 Debut With Latest World of Warcraft Patch
In what is likely to create a good deal of controversy along with a few cheers, Blizzard will be adding DirectX 12 support to World of Warcraft on Windows 7 thanks to a bit of effort from Microsoft. You might be wondering how that is possible? Well after seeing massive performance gains in WoW when Blizzard released their DirectX 12 update for Windows 10 in late 2018, resulted in the company wanting to bring those performance improvements to gamers still holding out on Windows 7. To facilitate this, they began talking with Microsoft who after getting a great deal of feedback from Blizzard decided to act on it. To achieve this Microsoft decided to port the user mode D3D12 runtime to Windows 7, which will unblock developers, thereby allows them to take advantage of the latest improvements that the DirectX 12 API offers while still giving full support to customers on older operating systems.
For now, World of Warcraft is the first game to run in DirectX 12 on Windows 7 with the latest 8.1.5 patch. However, they will not be the last as more developers are working on porting DirectX 12 games to Windows 7 with more announcements to follow. Microsoft, of course, has taken it upon themselves to remind everyone that the best possible performance with DirectX 12 will still be had on Windows 10 due to numerous OS optimizations. How true this is remains to be seen, but for many curmudgeons still holding out on Windows 7, this will likely be seen as a form of vindication for sticking with the now venerable OS.
Source:
MSDN Blog
For now, World of Warcraft is the first game to run in DirectX 12 on Windows 7 with the latest 8.1.5 patch. However, they will not be the last as more developers are working on porting DirectX 12 games to Windows 7 with more announcements to follow. Microsoft, of course, has taken it upon themselves to remind everyone that the best possible performance with DirectX 12 will still be had on Windows 10 due to numerous OS optimizations. How true this is remains to be seen, but for many curmudgeons still holding out on Windows 7, this will likely be seen as a form of vindication for sticking with the now venerable OS.
111 Comments on DirectX 12 Makes Windows 7 Debut With Latest World of Warcraft Patch
Nope.
still any game that I own and runs dx11/12 does so better on dx11 or the same on both apis.
edit: actually rotr does a lot better on dx12 in cpu heavy geothermal valley,I stand corrected.That's one game tho.
And for companies lik EA, their DX12 mode in BF was a disater, they managed to make it run worse than DX11.
I keep hearing more devs not wanting to bother with DX12 in favor of Vulcan. All sorts of development issues with DX12. Heck look how long consoles spent in the DX9 era with the 360 only having a slight edge due to having prototype tesselators. Devs got lazy. Took forever to move to 10, then since 11 launched it has taken till 12 before 11's features finally mattered. Not surprising 12 has not been smooth and that Vulcan has been making better progress. Specially because AMD started it with Mantle and then let it loose. It wasn't locked up to an OS and was more open to use. If anything, good job AMD. If you didn't spend time making it, we really indeed would still be on DX11.
API adoption always moves forward at a snail's pace, development takes years and when you have to go down into the engine on a lower level, that takes even longer. What you are describing isn't lazy devs, no dev willingly chooses lower overall performance unless there are economic reasons, which of course are always there. Time to market, extra dev time to adapt an engine, etc.
TBH bringing back hardware acclerated sound and standardize it properly might not be a bad idea.
They refused to add any at all just to push people over to W10.
One that when you put the USB stick in and start installing on a new computer, ASK if they should install:
[ ] Cortana
[ ] MS Office
[ ] Live Tiles on Start Menu
[ ] OneDrive
[ ] Junk games
[ ] Telemetry
[ ] Microsoft Store
[ ] X-Box crap and useless Game Bar
[ ] Other junk that usually comes preinstalled with W10 Home.
Let's say that such a version does exists, it's called Windows 10 Enterprise, but the pricing of that is not for mere mortals.
Windows 10 is quite good after you tweak it, disable and remove many of the bloat, but the "default" is annoying as fk to any power user, or even normal users that have used previous versions before, like 7, Vista, XP... Even to them the bloat is unbearable.
No need for DX12 on Windows 7, just a Windows 10 that doesn't suck !
M$ need faster and more users migration to windows 10 and DX 12 needed as one of M$ gimmicks to trap 'em (aka consumers) in update-that-always-break-something OS
Although, they might... Stranger things have happened.