Now here is a pleasant surprise. Microsoft has announced that it is bringing its latest API, DirectX 12, to Windows 7. Yeap, you read that right. Windows 7 now supports DX12 and the first game that can take advantage of it is World of Warcraft.
Now while World of Warcraft can run via DX12 on Windows 7, Microsoft claims that the best DirectX 12 performance will always be on Windows 10, and that’s because Windows 10 contains a number of OS optimizations designed to make DirectX 12 run even faster.
Unfortunately we don’t have Windows 7 installed in our system but it will be interesting to see, from third-party websites, benchmarks between Windows 10 and Windows 7 in World of Warcraft DX12.
Microsoft has also stated that it is currently working with a few other game developers to port their D3D12 games to Windows 7, and it will make further announcements about these plans in the near future.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Should be a lot more DX 12 games now. Too bad the extra performance will be used to offset Denuvo and at best get us close to where we used to be.
Thats great news for windows 7 users, i know metalmessiah will be thrilled 🙂
Are there any games besides Rise/Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Division 2 that give you a serious boost to FPS with DX12? Because most games I can think of still run equally or worse than DX11.
Probably Vermintide 2
Ashes of the Singularity (AOTS) , and maybe also Forza 7, Strange Brigade, and Gears of War 4 to some extent, but AOTS performs much better.
Despite being well optimized, you can’t really count Gears 4 or Forza because they’re DX12 only. Great to see well optimized games on the API, but we’d need a DX11 version to truly know how much of a difference it made.
Sniper Elite 4, Strange Brigade, Devil May Cry 5 on AMD GPUs, World of Warcraft, both Division games, Quantum Break in DX12 for AMD GPUs (helps with 1% and 0.1% lows)
Didn’t Digital Foundry recently show that DMC 5 runs ever so slightly better in DirectX 11?
(Capcom stupidly automated the choice of API so it’ll default to DX12 if a PC is able to use DX12 but should you wish to use DX11 then it can be forced via the game’s ini file.)
For DMC5 at least:
For AMD GPUs: DX12 is about as fast or slightly faster than DX11.
For Nvidia GPUs, Pascal/Turing: DX12 is about as fast or just very slightly slower than DX11
For Nvidia Fermi-Mawell GPUs: DX12 is absolutely slower than DX11.
I know Guild Wars 2 also recently got a fan-made DX12 patch that gives a huge FPS boost.
More like they will get more games to use DX 12 and then they will add features and or purposely cripple it on Win 7 to get people to adopt 10. Just a variation on embrace extend extinguish, except this time they are doing it to their own product.
Upvoted for cynicism! A wise policy when it comes to Microsoft’s motives.
America vs China.
DX12 for W7 and Halo Masterchief Collection being announced on PC, back to back, I had to check if the the date isn’t April 1st.
Let’s hope they just figured out that if they listen to the gaming community they’ll make more money. Halo on steam was a great surprise for me, im psyched! Never played Halo and i’ll FINALLY see it for myself ;).
To be fair, don’t expect much out of them. Except for Halo 1 on Xbox in 2001, Halo 4 on X360 în 2012 and arguably also Halo 5 on X1 in 2015, most of these games were not visual powerhouses for their respective years. Even the remakes for 1/2 are dramatically held back by their god awful level designs.
Can’t speak for the full franchise, given I only played 1 and 2 on PC, but except for the amazingly, ridiculously good soundtracks, I found everything about them mediocre (except for the great unexpected plot twist of Halo1). Like 7/10 titles at best.
When I played Halo CE back in the day it was amazing. A complete sci fi action adventure that really took me in. The world building, story and gameplay were great imo.
Oh well i’m here for the story 😉
Yeah I’m kind of shocked. I hope the keep this up. They’ve made some really good moves in the past few hours. And with MCC coming to Steam, they really knocked it out of the park.
My guess is the Collection requires DX12 to run, so porting it to Windows 7 brings in a HUGE number of potential customers.
Just my assumption, but the timing really sells it for me.
April fools joke? My calendar says its not yet, maybe my bios is malfunctioning!
Now bring DirectX to Linux and give you some actual competition in OS’s.
Good move so people will benchmark and see windows 10 is better (or they will slow down windows 7 to make it look like windows 10 is better)
Marketing at it’s finest
Can a win10 exclusive game be playable on Steam now that Directx12 is compatible?
lmao, suck it down Windows 10 fanboys, you know who you are.
B…b… but Win7 is incapable of running DX12. It would take a complete rewrite of the whole OS! Microsoft told me so!
And lots of Win10 and UWP fanboys where silenced this day…
I love Windows 10 (but I liked 8.x’s Start much more). Good for users running Windows 7.
you can just make win10’s start fullscreen like on 8
Yes. I miss 8.x’s Start’s horizontal scrolling (beautiful with a mouse wheel), being able to group tiles to any width I want (the only gaps between tiles are those I create), and parallax.
Those ought to be options in 10.
UWP has fanboys? How many are there, two?
Check the latest story about the rumor of Halo coming on PC on this site…
But before being official, there where lots of rumor stories, more than 10 years of rumor stories
As far as I know there’s only Sp4cTr0.
Ok..this is great news!
We rarely ever get anything good from Micros#!t these, but this is definitely good news. Hope I am not dreaming…
This development is seemingly rather perplexing.
Only yesterday did I see it stated in a Linus Tech Tips video that Microsoft will be ceasing security update support for Windows 7 in one year’s time because they don’t wish to ‘repeat the mistakes’ of Windows XP whereby many users stuck with an old OS long after Microsoft hoped for.
Yet today Microsoft are seemingly now working against that strategy by removing one of the incentives to upgrade to Windows 10. I can only presume Microsoft is operating on the basis that more Windows 7 users will choose to upgrade to Windows 10 sooner rather than later after having experienced the (GPU dependent) benefits of DirectX12.
This new move from MS seems like a TRAP to me, honestly speaking. Something fishy as well. But they will still drop the official support for Windows 7 next year, forcing some users to upgrade to Windows 10 OS.
Apart from this, they are still emphasizing the use of Windows 10 OS, to reap out the full benefits of DX12 (indirectly). Excerpt taken from their official BLOG post
“”Today, with game patch 8.1.5 for World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard becomes the first game developer to use DirectX 12 for Windows 7!
Now, Windows 7 WoW gamers can run the game using DirectX 12 and enjoy a framerate boost, though the best DirectX 12 performance will always be on Windows 10, since Windows 10 contains a number of OS optimizations designed to make DirectX 12 run even faster””.
I can’t deny the last part though, since they have a valid point when it comes to Win 10’s DX12 performance.
**comment edited**
A lot of their moves as of late have felt off and fishy to me, like their “game pass for everyone” initiative. it’s clear to me that Sony owns the sales figures and console OS usage stats, MS gave up like Blizz did on mentioning those stats, but now with this gamepass and requirement to use their network to play games across multiple systems/platforms, they’ll then start boasting about how they have the most “xbox” gamers and most players on total walled garden lock down.
MS hasn’t learn, it’s just trying to snare us in a different way.
https://www.htxt.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/its-a-trap.jpg
Thank you for pointing out a possible reality. Many people dont think it out nor look at the real cost of what a company does – especially a strange move like this. With MS there is always a catch. Might not be evident immediately, but its there.
Nice, now i’d like to see performance comparison between the two, i bet there’s no difference, or maybe within margin of error.
DX 12, only Sniper Elite 4 is the game I know of that takes advantage of it’s features and Ashes of the Benchmark. Greedy bastards don’t want to invest in making a game engine from scratch based on a new API
I was a surprised at first, but Its actually sneaky marketing move and dx12 demo version. Lets slap dx12 on win7 for one of the biggest gaming communities so they can see it really works much better in case of WoW after game was patched. Then we pull the plug on win7 so ppl will come to win10 spyware more easily, because oh crap win10 must be cool, my night elf huntard really shoots faster on dx12….then they will wake up after first cumulative update for Win10 they install will ruin their box…..just usual microsoft
Sweet, no reason to move to win10 cancer
Tencent owns 48.5 percent. It isn’t a controlling share. It is still owned and based on NC.
It’s a big number, but it is in shares. It means they have no control over the company and it is basically just being an investor and rolling profits. As long as it isn’t a controlling percentage (50% or more), the decisions are not theirs.
Sorry if I present actual facts instead of just believing whatever is popular at the time. How dare I. If doing actual research puts me at 14 years old, then so be it.
Was telling some MS fanboys that this would happen. As usual MS holds features hostage to force consumers into submission. This was planned out like this even before DX12’s release because it’s all based on a variant of the NT kernel but they needed users on their more lucrative data collection OS (the kiddos thinking it was really “free” no strings). There was no magical fairy dust that they just suddenly figured out. Just MS business as usual, that us in the professional sysadmin world are used to.
Also, be wary of the cost of MS giving PC gaming so much attention, especially with the new MCC. With MS, there is always a catch. Remember GFWL. MS new target is to S/P/I/GaaSify, or “service” everything and in gaming overthrow distribution/game service platforms. Now they have mass collected data pouring in for data scientists to crunch and to help MS very efficiently figure out the minimal viable product consumers will tolerate at the most cost to us (data and/or money), not for a good deal because they believe in the land of beautiful video games and puppies.
MS needs to remain “A dumbbell Windows Store” and that is IT – none of this unifying anything to dominate the OPEN PC platform. The second this happens, we are doomed with MS paywalls. Linux is still there for those of us who care about controlling our own systems.
When it comes to business, I trust MS less than EA.
spambot
I want DX11/12 brought to XP!
Don’t expect all DX12 games to be supported. Its only a select few games getting special treatment.