Blizzard added DirectX 12 support for their award-winning World of Warcraft game on Windows 10 in late 2018. This release received a warm welcome from gamers: thanks to DirectX 12 features such as multi-threading, WoW gamers experienced substantial framerate improvement. After seeing such performance wins for their gamers running DirectX 12 on Windows 10, Blizzard wanted to bring wins to their gamers who remain on Windows 7, where DirectX 12 was not available.
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.
Let that sink in: Microsoft backported Direct X 12 to Windows just for World of Warcraft. I guess World of Warcraft is just as important as SimCity.
isnt WoW so y2k in an era of Apex and Fortnight?
Seriously though, its an odd strategy, as DX12 was a major selling point of 10 over 7. This is just placating holdouts to repeat the mistakes of XP. Considering it officially stopped selling windows 7 in 2014, it should be encouraging those users to upgrade.
No, they shouldn’t. W10 is crap. W7 was the last decent version of Windows. I use it on my laptop only because the hardware isn’t supported by anything other than W10. I still have W7 on the desktop, and intend to keep it that way as long as possible. While W10 keeps breaking all the games I love, W7 still plays them like a champ.
“W7 was the last decent version of Windows”
Same was said about 98, 2000 and XP.
Yes, well those were true at different times, like W7 is the “last” decent Windows now. Until a better version comes along, W7 will remain the last decent version. Then we’ll all have a newer “last” decent version for a few versions as MS stumbles blindly along before accidentally creating a new decent version.
I’m guessing it’s because they have a bunch of users playing WoW on Win7 machines and they don’t want to alienate them or risk those users upgrading to a machine running something *other* than Windows.
Alternatively, it was a condition (or sweetener) for some other deal with Activision-Blizzard. “We’ll backport DX12 for you if you make game X exclusive to xbox” or whatever.
At least it just shows and proves how much of an artificial lockup these software are. I mean, haven’t Microsoft said that Windows 7 couldn’t handle all the new DirectX12 features ? Some people said that Windows 7 cannot handle all the new security enhancements Windows 10 provided, hence legitimate the upgrade. Thus I beg to differ under this new light…
Hm, and MS did it even though support for Win7 supposedly ends in less than a year …maybe it will yet be extended.