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
Should have just let it die, EOL is less than a year away.Yeah, tell me again how a home user can get LTSB, legally. I'll wait :)
From: www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-10-enterprise
In Home and Pro versions the only nags on unactivated copy are watermark and not being able to set desktop background with windows tools.
Regarding using Home or Pro past activation period despite nags...well that is a lot more gray. It's not stealing per se because digital copies are limitless and thus the original owner does not lose an item but it is certainly a morally dubious method to use client version.
When it comes to the topic itself if find it hard to believe that WoW runs DX12 on Win7 just with the included game files. If that's the case then all DX12 games which all ship with DX12 executables should run, but alas they don't because of missing system level support libraries.
My guess is that MS has a whitelist system in place to allow DX12 on Win7. Meaning any game not on the whitelist will not run in DX12 mode. I hope it's actually kind of like Nvidia supporting Adaptive Sync where only a handful of products are certified while the rest may work but may also be somewhat buggy.
Besides assuming you are on Win10 what does it matter to you when and if Win7 support ends?
And calling it a dinosaur is a gross exaggeration. Pre-XP yes but Win7 and even Vista are still quite modern in terms of how they do things.
* - Yes, I'm well aware calling it a PoS is also an exaggeration. It's not that bad, but it's time to put it out to pasture.
About DX12 running on windows 7 well it is an set of APIs if microsoft had the wish they could port it and to Linux and any other OS in existence that has the proper GPU drivers and GPU hardware support.My personal opionion as an Win7 user at home - I don't care my favorite game WoT just finally recieved full DX11.0 support :D My opinion as someone who hates fake and marketing locks of certain features - Don't go against the market you will loose. Since Vulkan API is a real threat to DX12 you can't ingnore it and force devs to use it instead of your product so they can have bigger user coverage and you to force users to switch to the new OS because of an artificial locks.
At the end i believe MS will stop working on a per title basis and just release DX12 to Win7 as an stand alone the way it should be.
store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
Hell, the right click on the start menu to directly access things like Computer Management, PowerShell, Power Options, Run, Settings, Network & Internet Settings, Event Viewer is awesome. The right click menu on the Start button alone is worth switching to Windows 10.
Emulation, windows gaming on linux (via Wine?) often takes a massive performance hit. The same goes for any sort of emulation, granted it also depends on the hardware but native performance will always be higher. Admittedly we'll have to see what DX12 features WoW has on win7, but it goes without saying that not everything will work as it does on win10.