March 12th, 2019

World of Warcraft uses DirectX 12 running on Windows 7

Jianye Lu
Program Manager

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.

Today, with game patch 8.1.5 for World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard becomes the first game developer to use DirectX 12 for Windows 7! Now, Windows 7 WoW gamers can run the game using DirectX 12 and enjoy a framerate boost, though the best DirectX 12 performance will always be on Windows 10, since Windows 10 contains a number of OS optimizations designed to make DirectX 12 run even faster.

We’d like to thank the development community for their feedback. We’re so excited that we have been able to partner with our friends in the game development community to bring the benefits of DirectX 12 to all their customers. Please keep the feedback coming!

FAQ Any other DirectX 12 game coming 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.

How are DirectX 12 games different between Windows 10 and Windows 7? Windows 10 has critical OS improvements which make modern low-level graphics APIs (including DirectX 12) run more efficiently. If you enjoy your favorite games running with DirectX 12 on Windows 7, you should check how those games run even better on Windows 10!

[Update: 2019-08-08] I have more questions… Please post your questions and feedback at DirectX Discord.

Category
DirectX

Author

Jianye Lu
Program Manager

Program Manager on the Graphics Team at Microsoft.

17 comments

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  • 茗琪 周

    Hi Jianye,We are working on a game and also trying to use dx12 on windows 7. Could your team give us technical support? 

  • Miloš Tonić

    What happened with you guys. Supporting open community and different platforms, even owning biggest projects on GitHub and now this. Listening to customers, really?
    Where is old arrogant M$ as we remember it 😛
    Good Job

  • Ian Green

    would this not undermind Microsoft’s desire for Window 7 holdouts to upgrade to Windows 10

  • Владимир Золотенький

    это всё прекрасно. как на счёт dx12 в седьмой windows?

  • Seraj K

    How about abandon that junk windows10 which is like those tablet and phone OS’s that failed and make real succesor to Windows 7 so maybe half the user base which is still on W7 will finally upgrade.

  • Nao Mori

    I want to use DirectX11.X on Windows7 

  • jethro brewin

    With windows7 effectively on its last legs for non volume licensing customers this seems like an odd choice. 

  • Shawn HargreavesMicrosoft employee

    Apologies for the loss of comments from yesterday.  It was bad timing that this WoW release happened just one day before our scheduled move to a new blog site, and we weren’t able to preserve comment history during that migration.

  • Zoltan R

    Yeah, Where disappeared all the comments? Anyway if Windows 7 would receive again drivers and good updates, it would kill off Windows 10 in no time.