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Microsoft Brings DirectX 12 To Windows 7 (anandtech.com)
Microsoft has announced a form of DirectX 12 that will support Windows 7. "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," reports AnandTech. "Instead, Microsoft has stated that they are working with a few other developers to bring their DX12 games/backends to Windows 7 as well. 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." From the report: For 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. This was a response to single-threaded CPU performance plateauing, making complex graphical workloads increasingly CPU-bounded. There's many advantages to using this API over traditional DX11, especially for threading and draw calls. But, Microsoft made the decision long ago to only support DirectX 12 on Windows 10, with its WDDM 2.0 driver stack.
Today's announcement is a pretty big surprise on a number of levels. 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. 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. 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. 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. It's just bizarre.
Today's announcement is a pretty big surprise on a number of levels. 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. 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. 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. 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. It's just bizarre.
Seems like a great way to get people to install a patch that includes a nag screen. Just attach something of value to it!
I distinctly remember MS saying it was impossible for win 7 to get any newer DX versions because of the infrastructure in win 10 they said allows those new versions of DX to function.
Weird, almost like they were lying?
They probably found out, that their new Nag-Popup needs DirectX 12 to work.
DX12 was never difficult to bring to Windows 7. The sole reason it was only released to Windows 10 was to drive adoption of Win 10.
I refer you to Win32s and WinG, as well as several components of Games for Windows Live.
If you're not familiar with those, they were all released by MIcrosoft, but not part of the core OS, but required to run a multitude of bits of software, never quite elevating the underlying system to the realms of full compatibility across the board but just bodging it enough that some "big money" software developer could bribe Microsoft into expanding their market a little, temporarily.
GfW Live, for example, worked fine on XP for many years. Then it stopped. Then it worked fine on 7 for many years. Then there were problems. All to do with underlying technology upgrades, (e.g. .NET Framework, etc.) that it was reliant on, but yet never quite pushing you out (I got Toy Soldiers on Steam to continue to run on XP with GfW Live by dropping in some DLLs available from the Microsoft site, but it was far from easy - if you were a casual user it was basically impossible after a certain period of time as GfW Live demanded things that only Windows 7 actually had).
This is going to be a "mini-DX12" to literally run WoW because WoW have asked for it. That's it. No different to how Microsoft never actually shipped a proper OpenGL DLL for many years.
Microsoft won't give you full DX12, even though it's perfectly viable, because they know you then won't upgrade past 7 for another few years. What they'll do is throw you a bone, because WoW are basically paying them to, that'll work for a small subset of programs. It'll work for a couple of years but not for enough to keep you "DX12 compatible" in any significant way.
This is the biggest problem with Microsoft.... planned obsolescence and pretending to give a damn.
Having said that there's a major problem with this update mechanism: OEMs will eventually stop releasing up to date drivers for new Windows 10 releases and you'll end up with a Windows 10 PC/laptop where some piece of your equipment no longer works.