14 DAY TRIAL // In a surprising move, Microsoft is now helping developers to bring their Direct X 12-only games to Windows 7.
For the longest time, Microsoft has been saying that people really need to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10, in part so that we can get all the good stuff that comes with Direct X 12.
It turns out that peoples don’t usually do what Microsoft is telling them and if we can belive the Steam statistics, almost 20% of users are still using Windows 7, showing no intention of switching. Many like the operating systems, while others don’t have the hardware to make the switch.
Can’t ignore so many users
Since Microsoft’s plan to have everyone on Windows 10 is not exactly going on schedule, the company is now forced to make some changes to the strategy. A big reason for Microsoft’s change of heart is the push from major companies such as Blizzard, for example.
A while back, Blizzard decided to upgrade the World of Warcraft client so that it can take advantage of Direct X 12. The community responded with joy because the frame rates went up, and who doesn’t want that? But a large number of players were still using Windows 7 and Blizzard wanted to help them as well, so they reached out to Microsoft.
Jianye Lu, a senior program manager at Microsoft, explained that the original scope of their porting process has been expanded to incorporate more games. “We announced “World of Warcraft uses DirectX 12 running on Windows 7” back in March. Since that time, we have received warm welcome from the gaming community, and we continued to work with several game studios to further evaluate this work. To better support game developers at larger scales, we are publishing the following resources to allow game developers to run their DirectX 12 games on Windows 7.”
The resources include a Development Guidance Document, the D3D12onWin7 NuGet package, and D3D12 sample. With this support, studios should have a much easier time bringing Direct X 12 games to Windows 7, just like it happened with the upcoming Gears 5.