Microsoft makes it easier to port DirectX 12 games to Windows 7

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that they had successfully ported DirectX 12 to Windows 7, enabling the performance benefits of the new API to be accessible to a larger number of Windows users. This feature was first used with World of Warcraft, enabling the game to run better on most Windows-powered systems thanks to DirectX 12’s multi-threading enhancements. 

Now, Microsoft is making it easier to run their DirectX 12 titles on Windows 7, creating a “Development Guidance Document” as well as other useful development resources. Microsoft hopes that this will allow developers to bring the benefits of DirectX 12 to more of their customers, while also increasing the API’s adoption by both gamers and game developers. 
   
One thing to note is that Microsoft expects DirectX 12 games to run best on Windows 10, having previously stated that their new OS includes “critical OS improvements” that allow the OS to make better use of the low-level API. Even so, enabling DirectX 12 support over a wider range of OS’ cannot be seen as anything other than a positive move for Microsoft.  

    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. Please post technical question or feedback to our Discord channel at http://discord.gg/directx.

• Development Guidance Document – please read through this document before planning and coding
• D3D12onWin7 NuGet package, which contains header file, binary files, and license terms to unblock coding
• D3D12 sample, which runs on both Win7 and Win10 with the same binary

We would like to thank the development community for their help in evolving the DirectX 12 technology, and we have been so excited to work with game developers to bring the benefits of DirectX 12 to all their customers. Please keep the feedback coming!