Pocket-Lint: "Microsoft has sold more than 240 million licenses for Windows 7 in its first year of existence, making it the fastest selling OS in history.
And, to mark its first birthday, Microsoft is releasing the Windows 7 Family Pack to the UK."
Windows 7 official support ended recently and inXile Entertainment are now pushing Bard's Tale IV players to install Windows 10 apparently. Considering it was originally playable in Windows 7, players are not liking the minimum system requirements change.
Building on the success of porting WoW's DX12 version to Windows 7, Microsoft has published help for other DX12 devs, which includes a runtime that supports all the features of Windows 10 October Update... including DirectX Raytracing.
That's right, DirectX 12 has come to Windows 7
Strange they made this update with DX12 when Windows 7 is going to be EOL next year
I guess when they said they needed the new kernel for DX12 that was just them spewing BS like they always do. I knew this to be true, because Win10's kernel is essentially Win7's kernel. Same BS they've spewed for so many DX updates locked behind new versions of windows, which held back PC gaming for so long, because devs wouldn't use the new API's, and even skipped generations of the API because MS didn't sell enough of the new OS's to make it worthwhile for the dev.
it is a surprise though, because I thought they were going to abandon older versions of windows because Win10 was their way forward, and Win7 doesn't have the native access to Live like they have now.
DX12 allows much better optimization. But that is of course up to the developer to take advantage of.
Since DirectX12 was built around Windows 10, it will always offer superior performance compared to Windows 7
If the dev takes advantage of it then yes. Even if you don't have a DX12 card, there are some things with the rendering pipeline which are better than previous versions. The low level stuff can be hit or miss with older cards, but luckily it can adapt when you do the actual application runtime.
@Captain
DX is not built around Win10. The graphics API, which is the most important, is not actually tied to the kernel, and Win10 uses essentially the same kernel as Win7. MS saying it's a kernel related issue was them just once again trying to get gamers to upgrade to new versions of windows, just like they have so many other times in the past. That lie that MS kept spewing has held back console gaming for years, because devs often wouldn't support new versions of DX because people weren't upgrading their OS's.
Win10 does have other advantages in terms of game performance, but it has nothing to do with how the API and kernel are connected.
@Maybe
No, it wouldn't.
The windows Kernel, and DirectX have no direct relationship to one another. One is a software API that runs in windows, and is not dependent on it outside the interpreter that handles the instructions that get carried out between the API and the hardware. Windows itself does not in any way need DirectX, nor does the base rendering process have any connection to how Windows renders the OS, or anything in it. Developers can enable that in their programs, but it isn't required. It is even possible to uninstall DirectX if one knows the process to do so. I have done so on many occasions in my work due to beta versions having issues which didn't allow me to do my work, so I had to reinstall other versions.
Win10 is a modified version of Win7. A few core commands have changed, but the meat of the kernel is still the same. There may be dependencies for DX built into Windows which are based on the kernel, but dependencies can be implemented in older versions to allow it to work. MS just chose not to do so, because they want to push new versions of windows.
Seems strange to port it to Windows 7 at the same time they started to notify customers it has reached its end of life lol
Woah, that's great actually! I can finally throw my Win 10 in the trash and go back to an OS that doesn't f*** up my games performance at each update.
considering that people were abandoning the Windows Vista Ship quickly, i believe it.
240 million? That's friggin' huge. I wonder how much of that figure went into gaming PCs?
240 million that just insane!