World of Warcraft gamers could run the game using DirectX 12 to benefit from better framerates and other improvements. Blizzard, maker of World of Warcraft and other games, was the first company to support a DirectX 12 game on Windows 7. Microsoft began to port the Direct3D 12 runtime as a response to Windows 7. Windows 7 systems were stuck with DirectX 11.0 and 11.1, Windows 8.1 with Direct X 11.1 and 11.2įour years later, in early 2019, Microsoft suddenly announced that DirectX 12 support would be coming to select games on Windows 7.Â Game companies urged Microsoft to bring DirectX 12 to Windows 7 to make use of advanced capabilities and reduce development costs at the same time. Rumors suggested that the new version would not be made available to earlier versions of Windows, and a Microsoft support article confirmed that. Microsoft revealed at the end of 2014 that Windows 10 would indeed ship with DirectX 12 support. We assumed back then that Microsoft would limit DirectX artificially to Windows 8 or the upcoming version of Windows which we assumed would be Windows 9.

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