World of Warcraft uses DirectX 12 running on Windows 7

Jianye Lu

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.

17 comments

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  • Danial Horton 0

    where did all the comments go?

    • Alessio T 0

      They are moving the old msdn blog to this “mobile-first” version. Dunno if the old comments will be restored, but they are missing in al articles. Personally I am tired of this mobile oversemplification, I liked more the old msdn template.

  • Danial Horton 0

    so some weird ass stuff is happening,  i got here via the msdn version of this article and there was comments, once i logged in im on devblogs instead and there are no comments.
     
    can’t get back to msdn version either.

  • SuperCocoLoco . 0

    The most common sense is to completity migrate all DirectX 12 to Windows 7 and all related technologies like WPF. Windows 7 is the last Microsoft OS for desktop because Windows 8.x and 10 are mobile/cloud OS only and NOT FIT on desktop computers.

  • SuperCocoLoco . 0

    The most common sense is to completity migrate all DirectX 12 to Windows 7 and all related technologies like WPF. Windows 7 is the last Microsoft OS for desktop because Windows 8.x and 10 are limited and less featured mobile/cloud OS only with toys mobile apps (UWP) and NOT FIT on desktop computers. Also take note that UWP is the worst computer software platform ever developed by any company.

  • Eyal Teler 0

    Seems like a redesign coincided with this post, erasing all the complaints.
    Would be nice if this blog post had any meat, telling developers how they might get their own DX12 games on Windows 7, and what the actual differences are between the Windows 7 and Windows 10 versions.
    Unfortunately, it seems like Microsoft’s desire to help developers is just lip service.

  • Danial Horton 0

    ET3D Said:
    AMD no longer supports Windows 8.1. NVIDIA doesn’t have Windows 8.1 drivers for download for its RTX cards. So even if Microsoft does support this for 8.1, in practice it will not work in many cases.
     
     
    Nvidia’s RTX cards are “supported” on Windows 8.1 with the windows 7 package,  just don’t go emailing nvidia support if you experience issues.

  • Zoltan R 0

    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.

  • Shawn HargreavesMicrosoft employee 0

    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.

  • jethro brewin 0

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

  • Nao Mori 0

    I want to use DirectX11.X on Windows7 

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