What's likely a move to curb an exodus to linux as 7 support ends, microsoft is sort of porting dx12 to 7. Games need to be ported specifically to the 7 version of dx12 rather than porting 12 full on to 7, so won't be able to run all the current and future dx12 games straight away.

https://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech/Uh-Wo … tX-12-Windows-7

https://www.overclock3d.net/news/software/mic … latest_update/1

Multithreading in DirectX 12 explained:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/38748203/ … g-in-directx-12

A very uncharacteristic move from Microsoft - to backport new technology to an old OS past the date of mainstream support, but they must have really received feedback from major developers to do something like this. Kudos to them.

I'm really thinking that maybe I should myself do the unthinkable and upgrade my Vista desktop to Win7. I love Vista's look&feel, but the low market share pushed Microsoft to kill it as fast as it reasonable could, already things are breaking on it...

I don't see any real info on this.
As far as I can tell, there hasn't been an update to Windows 7 which actually adds DX12 DLLs to your installation.
Also, there hasn't been an SDK update that does this, as far as I can tell.
So, as far as I understand it, there is some kind of 'DX12 lite runtime for Windows 7', which is only available to select developer relations. This runtime allows them to use certain parts of the DX12 API under Windows 7, provided that they do their own QA, because it is considered a part of their application, not the OS (after all, Windows 7 doesn't get mainstream support, so no new features, and only security-related bugfixes).

So this doesn't make all DX12 code run on Windows 7, nor does it allow anyone to develop DX12 on Windows 7 (only developers that 'Microsoft is working with', sounds a bit like AMD's Mantle). To me it sounds mostly like some marketing stunt.
As they already say, it doesn't give you all the features and performance of the full DX12 on Windows 10, so what's the point anyway?

I think it's going to be Fermi class DirectX 12 support.
Basicly : It's there, but performance won't be as good.
For WoW it's fine, however, is it good enough for AAA games DX12 heavy games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider ?
Only time will tell.

Also, because it's Windows 7, you might be able to run DX12 on Pentium III 😁
Assuming it's not locked to SSE2/SSE3 or something...

Maybe we will play Gears of War 4 on Windows 7 ?

From what I've read its just for World of Warcraft, I could be wrong but that is how it looks to me.

Scali wrote:

I don't see any real info on this. As far as I can tell, there hasn't been an update to Windows 7 which actually adds DX12 DLLs […]
Show full quote

I don't see any real info on this.
As far as I can tell, there hasn't been an update to Windows 7 which actually adds DX12 DLLs to your installation.
Also, there hasn't been an SDK update that does this, as far as I can tell.
So, as far as I understand it, there is some kind of 'DX12 lite runtime for Windows 7', which is only available to select developer relations. This runtime allows them to use certain parts of the DX12 API under Windows 7, provided that they do their own QA, because it is considered a part of their application, not the OS (after all, Windows 7 doesn't get mainstream support, so no new features, and only security-related bugfixes).

So this doesn't make all DX12 code run on Windows 7, nor does it allow anyone to develop DX12 on Windows 7 (only developers that 'Microsoft is working with', sounds a bit like AMD's Mantle). To me it sounds mostly like some marketing stunt.
As they already say, it doesn't give you all the features and performance of the full DX12 on Windows 10, so what's the point anyway?

I personally find the whole gesture a little odd, but as long as there are people on Win7 that will at the very least gain a lot of performance off of this, then I see it as a good thing. Here's what someone that works on this had to say, it seems like they are considering making it a larger release and not just a title by title rollout.

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/dx12-on-wi … 6/#post-2062137

agent_x007 wrote:

I think it's going to be Fermi class DirectX 12 support. Basicly : It's there, but performance won't be as good. For WoW it's fi […]
Show full quote

I think it's going to be Fermi class DirectX 12 support.
Basicly : It's there, but performance won't be as good.
For WoW it's fine, however, is it good enough for AAA games DX12 heavy games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider ?
Only time will tell.

Also, because it's Windows 7, you might be able to run DX12 on Pentium III 😁
Assuming it's not locked to SSE2/SSE3 or something...

Maybe we will play Gears of War 4 on Windows 7 ?

well this is WoW exclusive for now;

I think Fermi is always slower with DX12,

WoW's DX12 support is for performance and it does run faster than DX11, so I would think even on 7 DX12 is there for performance and is going to be faster (well on AMD and Maxwell+ at least)

Gears 4 is an MS store exclusive, so MS porting that to 7 would be even more unexpected, but who knows,
some level of DX12 for 7 is also very unexpected, less than 1 year away from the end of support!

now... if the drivers are compatible in DX12 mode and all it would be interesting to test some really old CPUs with it I guess!

in any case... it would've been nicer if they just supported Vulkan... it works fine on 7 and Linux.

*watches from afar while eating open source popcorn*

agent_x007 wrote:

I think it's going to be Fermi class DirectX 12 support.
Also, because it's Windows 7, you might be able to run DX12 on Pentium III 😁
Assuming it's not locked to SSE2/SSE3 or something...

Oh that would be funny, I'd like to see someone try WoW on Win7 with dual Pentium3's and a GTX480.

You can't pair Pentium III with GTX 480 😁
Highest you can get on it is GT 430/440 PCI.

I'm pretty sure you won't get Win7 DX12 support on it though (NV drop support for Fermi).

agent_x007 wrote:

You can't pair Pentium III with GTX 480 😁
Highest you can get on it is GT 430/440 PCI.

I'm pretty sure you won't get Win7 DX12 support on it though (NV drop support for Fermi).

What if you use a PCI to PCI-E adapter with the adapter having auxiliary power?

agent_x007 wrote:

I'm pretty sure you won't get Win7 DX12 support on it though (NV drop support for Fermi).

Fermi did receive a DX12 driver update though, in mid 2017: https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/nvidia-ferm … 12-support.html
I wonder what the requirements for a driver are to work in Win7 DX12 mode.
Chances are it doesn't actually need to be a DX12 driver at all, because it's all user-mode anyway, and WDDM1.1.

cyclone3d wrote:

What if you use a PCI to PCI-E adapter with the adapter having auxiliary power?

Damn good point, I've never seen a powered PCI to PCI-e adapter and I think those low end pci Fermi were excluded from DX12 support.

BinaryDemon wrote:

Damn good point, I've never seen a powered PCI to PCI-e adapter and I think those low end pci Fermi were excluded from DX12 support.

I have a laptop with a Quadro NVS 4200, which is based on the GeForce 410M (GF119), and that has DX12 support. So I'm pretty sure all Fermis have DX12 support, not just the high end ones.

Merged threads.

Assuming it's not locked to SSE2/SSE3 or something...

I think most games past 2010 will require at least SSE2 to run.

A very uncharacteristic move from Microsoft - to backport new technology to an old OS past the date of mainstream support

Windows 7 and 8.1 are still largely used, which is problematic for developers, because they need both DX11 and DX12 renderers supported. And we all know how DirectX 10 exclusivity fiasco ended - many developers didn't bother to switch from DX9 until DX11.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Windows 7 and 8.1 are still largely used, which is problematic for developers, because they need both DX11 and DX12 renderers supported. And we all know how DirectX 10 exclusivity fiasco ended - many developers didn't bother to switch from DX9 until DX11.

Not sure if that is the reason. After all, there is Vulkan support on Windows 7 and 8.1.
So developers could choose to use Vulkan instead of DX12. Yet they didn't. I'm not entirely sure why. Neither Vulkan nor DX12 seems to be widely used. My theory is that the learning curve is too high, and gains are too small.
Of the few games that do have Vulkan or DX12 support, the gains are marginal at best, and in some cases the DX12 version actually runs slower than the DX11 version.
Writing a Vulkan/DX12 engine is very difficult in the first place. Getting it right to the point that it is actually more efficient than DX11 or OpenGL seems a bridge too far for mere mortal devs.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Windows 7 and 8.1 are still largely used, which is problematic for developers, because they need both DX11 and DX12 renderers supported.

They don't 😉
Crackdown 3 supports only dx12