Hell has frozen over. And there's more games coming: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/di...arcraft-uses-directx-12-running-on-windows-7/
Huh ... wut They're bringing Edge to windows 7 as well. Why are they doing all this when windows 7 support ends in less than a year?
It's anyone's guess. My guess would be a lot of companies lobbying with Microsoft, saying half their userbase or more is still using Win7, why can't we make use of Dx12 there as well. That Blizzard is in the forefront is not super surprising since they've always tried to make their games playable on as old hardware as possible.
I recall one of the blizzard engineers that came on later in WoW was surprised at how well the game's framework was abstracted from the underlining API. He mentioned they could port the entire game to Vulkan in a couple weeks and have it fully playable but it would require months of validation to ensure all the shaders and stuff work throughout the decade+ of effects they have. Seems like the perfect game to do something like this on.
The only thing mentioned in the blue post for this is to make sure graphics drivers are updated, no mention of Windows Update. So I guess it just somehow works via the game engine? Weird.
Yeah it can be interpreted like that from their blog post. Integrating directly into the game instead of a platform update. I guess they want to drive up DX12 adoption. Too little, too late due to win7's deadline but let's see how this plays out. " Microsoft is pleased to announce that we have ported the user mode D3D12 runtime to Windows 7. " "We are currently working with a few other game developers to port their D3D12 games to Windows 7. Please watch out for further announcement."
Give some life to windows 7 sluggish peasants. Inferior OS will still be inferior until the end of times.
It sounds like it's bringing some of the api features from DX12 to Windows 10, but not a full DX12. More or less one thing the article mentions is WoW going multithreaded. So maybe that's what the DX12 runtime is giving only.
Very late and...crazy move. "At Microsoft, we make every effort to respond to customer feedback, so when we received this feedback from Blizzard and other developers, we decided to act on it. Microsoft is pleased to announce that we have ported the user mode D3D12 runtime to Windows 7. This unblocks developers who want to take full advantage of the latest improvements in D3D12 while still supporting customers on older operating systems."
Windows 10 is handling multithreading better than windows 7, idk how useful its gonna be. Still, improvements are welcome even if minor. Dont get your hopes up guys, seven does not support dx12.
I guess, they are testing something. Perhaps Windows 10 is going to die badly and a new OS windows 7 based, is gonna surface, soon™.
