DX12 Win 7

[Destro]

Does this mean that someday we may have a fully working direct x 12 on win 7.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3365177/microsoft-ports-directx-12-to-windows-7.html

[bphlpt]

Unfortunately, I doubt it. It seems they drew from the DX12 API and packaged up a dll that works with one game's calls for specific uses, I doubt very much they'll release the complete DX12 runtimes. There would be a LOT of driver access issues, since WIn 10 handles that totally different to Windows 7, so it would really only be the API's that spread the GPU load across multiple cores instead of single thread.

If you want to get technical, you could say it's a DLL that in theory you could call, but you would need to disassemble the DLL to get the API names and input/output values. So in theory anyone could use these new DirectX 12 features instead of the DX 11 ones and it would give you dual core control. But I can't think of anybody who would be willing to put in that sort of time. What MS could have done is made Unreal Engine and Unity support the same feature. This would give Win 7 a leg up in the games area and make many people happy, I imagine it would be quite easy for MS, Epic and Unity Technologies to compile their Engines to support such things, Then each Game could be recompiled to support the new engine instead of having to re-code each game. Seeing as most people use steam etc to update their games, it would happen automatically for most users.

The issue is that MS doesn't want Windows 7 to be around anymore.

Cheers and Regards

[broken120x120]

Microsoft seems to know that there is a large amount of people who are sticking with Windows 7 (and with good reason) by now. Why they have selectively ported features (Edge, and now DX12 for some games) from 10 to 7 is a bit mind boggling though, especially in the last year of support.  It's welcome, I guess, if you have a use for DX12, but you would think they would still continue to try and force users to 10 as they have continuously done in the past.   

 

[erpdude8]

it's only the D3D (direct3d) portion of DX12 that is getting back ported to Win7