While Moth admitted that that could change in future - ' I personally am still crossing my fingers, but not as tightly as I did a few months ago,' he claimed - it looks like, for now, gamers after the latest and greatest DirectX features will be saddled with Windows 8 and all the changes that brings.A few years ago I installed Windows 8.1 on my Mac Pro cylinder so I could play games that weren't available on macOS. ' DirectX 11 was made available for Vista, but at this point there is no plan for DirectX 11.1 to be made available on Windows 7.' ' DirectX 11.1 is part of Windows 8, just like DirectX 11 was part of Windows 7,' Moth claimed. It's also, it seems, going to remain a Windows 8 exclusive.Īnswering a developer's question about the WARP software rasteriser, Microsoft's Daniel Moth confessed in a post that developers wishing to use WARP will be limited to Windows 8. While it's only really the latter that affects how things appear to the end-user - and even then only if they're interested in 3D gaming but don't have a compatible Nvidia or AMD graphics chip supporting proprietary 3D display modes - it's still a worthwhile upgrade, and one of the features of Windows 8 Microsoft likes to trot out at launch events and press conferences.

Microsoft has confirmed that DirectX 11.1, its latest-generation framework package for Windows 8, will not be making the move downstream to users on Windows 7.ĭesigned to enhance, rather than replace, DirectX 11, DirectX 11.1 introduces a wealth of new features including portions of the XNA framework being added in, better cooperation between Direct3D, Direct2D and DirectCompute GPU acceleration models, a new software rasteriser dubbed WARP, the performance-boosting Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) 1.2 and a new vendor-neutral system for supporting stereoscopic displays for true-3D applications.

Directx 11 windows 8.1