Windows 7 will not support DX12

DirectX 12 will not be supported by Windows 7 - PC Gamer

Looks like gamers gonna have to upgrade.

 

Great! Microsoft wants to force people from leaving their favorite OS to install their new Garbage (Win8/10)!

 

XP got DX8 and DX9. Vista got DX10 and DX11.

7, Microsoft's best-selling OS ever, only gets DX11...?

Yeah, with their recent failures with Windows 8 and mobile, M$ is more desperate than it's been in a long time, having to resort to locking Windows 7 users out of DX12 to force upgrades to Windows 10 since they know scores of PC gamers will have no choice.

 

I hope someone will figure a way to forcefully install DX12 on Windows 7 FTW

 

Sadly, if history is any indication, such experiments never end well.

 

Right, so now I have to install Windows 10 when it's released and bite the bullet by force to enjoy the latest and greatest DX12 Games!

Windows 8.1 is another story, I wouldn't use it even if you paid me. Having have tried it over 30 times and each time some quirk shows up that makes me quickly uninstall it and go running back to Windows 7........ This is very sad news man......

I wanted to use Windows 7 for as long as possible........it has become the new XP that everyone wants....

Someone on MDL forums said this....

 

LOL that would be hilarious.

Unfortunately gamers will still be forced to upgrade because we want (need) the best performance and graphics.

 

Hey Ferris, at least you have Mantle. For Nvidia card users it's DX12 or bust.

One last gleam of hope I'm holding onto is the fact that this was revealed by Richard Huddy, an AMD employee, and not M$ itself. M$ has yet to confirm or deny or make any official comment on his statement. Mantle is, in some ways, a direct competitor to DX12, despite whatever AMD will have you believe, so there's maybe (probably) an element of self-interest there.

DX12 will roll out alongside Windows 10 and that's about a year away, so final OS compatibility is very much up in the air for the time being. It's not set in stone at this point so I don't want to kill all hope of DX12 on Windows 7 just yet, but I am pessimistic.

 

Microsoft knows that Windows 7 is the best os. It is because Win 7 users will not choose Win 8/10 they do this. :laugh:

 

I'm not so familiar with Mantle. What difference does it make? isn't DX for all graphics cards and is a language for the game's engine?

 

Mantle works in some games that have this support. It is essentially the same as Dx from Ms, but better optimized for gaming with Ati's Mantle optimized drivers ..

 

We could also hope that game developers include DX11 options in their game setup screens ... the way the Metro game(s) do ... (think it's 2033 but not sure) ...

 

Mantle and DirectX 12 are low level-graphics API's which promise improved performance (and potentially visuals) in games which use them, especially when the CPU is the bottleneck. However, Mantle is supported only on recent AMD GPU's from 2012 onward built on the GCN architecture while DX12 is supported on GPU's from all 3 major PC graphics IHV's (AMD, Intel, and Nvidia). The first DX12 games won't ship until holidays 2015, so Mantle has a 2-year head start. The list of current games which support Mantle is here. You can expect a lot more within the next year.

DX12 games probably will have a DX11 fallback like the majority of DX11 games have an alternate DX10 or even DX9 path. At least until 2020 when Windows 7 support ends. I just don't see game devs cutting off a large percentage of their potential customers like that.

 

That is true, game developers will develop for the platforms available to make some profit on. Until dx12 has a good market saturation companies will not spend R&D on it. You have seen what this strategy has done for metro apps and the app store. What of Windows 8 and DX 11.2? By not giving the platform to Windows 7 users/gamers they loose their main marketing advantage, existing market base!

To me this is just showing their desperation, forcing the mindset of consumers with vaporware and even once it no longer is that waiting for support that may never show up, or at least take forever. The company has walked away from so many of its own proven marketing strategies it is mind boggling.

Edit; Also you can see where they are now listening. Still up to the strong arm tactics that got them such a bad rep with Windows 8.x. So you guys all just go ahead and trust them if you dare, they have proven yet again they will do whatever they want to try and force the upgrade and their ideals.

 

Hm...
If this ends up being the case... then is it possible that Mantle could gain an upper hand because of this?

From a technical point of view... Windows 7 could easily have DX12 if MS decided to implement it... and through another update packet, they could probably give Win 7 all of the 'goodies' contained in Windows 8.1 and 10 without sacrificing the start menu and also lowering the OS as well...
But as we know... MS as a corporation has to push out new OS-es all the time to make more profits.

 

Possibly...due to Windows 7 holdouts using AMD cards playing Mantle games, which is a somewhat exclusive group.

It's way too early to know how things will shake out in the long term. Whether DX12 will eventually kill Mantle. Or whether Mantle will continue to exist as its own thing (as Glide did alongside OGL and D3D back in the day). Or whether Intel or Nvidia will adopt Mantle.

Plus the fact that the Mantle ramp up in terms of game and developer support is still in its early stages, although its adoption rate is already much better than DX11's in the same time frame. I expect industry uptake to fairly explode once the SDK is publicly released later this year: AMD’s Public Mantle SDK Coming This Year, NVIDIA & Intel Free To Use It | DSOGaming | The Dark Side Of Gaming

It's just strange to me that Windows 7, despite being such a popular OS, would get so little love in terms of DirectX. XP, Vista, and 8 all got at least 2 two new versions, many more if you count the important sub-versions such as DX9.0c. It seems Windows 7 is forever stuck on DX11.0

 

The key allure of DX12 is reducing CPU overhead and making games less CPU bound correct? If so just chuck more CPU at it until it caves.

But since I'm not hardcore enough of a gamer, that's still not enough for me to upgrade to Windows 10. Maybe Windows 12 when M$ finally realizes strong arm tactics are not going to work. Until then I'll relinquish Windows 7 when M$ pries it out of my cold dead hands.

 

There may not be much more CPU to chuck at it if Intel (and physics) keeps this up.

And then you having companies like Ubisoft going berserk and trying to do 3 million draw calls per second on DX11 which no CPU can handle in real-time...

 

Ah, so that's why those Xeon E7's sport 12+ cores nowadays. Who knew $5000 worth of processing power would actually be of use to gamers some day?

Jokes aside it's not a pleasant situation, but like you said DX12 games will still likely have DX11 as a fallback, and I just can't see DX12 exclusive games coming out anytime soon. In any case by the end of 2016 we should have a fairly clear picture of where the future of PC gaming is headed.

 

Those Xeons with a bunch of relatively slow cores aren't good at all for gaming right now. DX11 doesn't scale well beyond a few cores, bulk of the work is still done on a single thread. Mantle and DX12 promise to improve multithreading greatly and then lots of cores might actually be useful to us gamers. At the very least, they'll let games take advantage of your Hyper-Threaded hexacore much better.

 

I know some games are notorious CPU hogs, but don't most games become GPU bound long before they become CPU bound? Or does improved CPU parallelism also help in GPU bound cases? If so how?

Also didn't you post a graph showing the 5960X slaughtering every other CPU in ACU with 2 extra cores even at the expense of slower speed, due to the ridiculous number of draw calls? I kinda figured more cores may help if I ever ran into an ACU like situation in the future.

 

Like you said, it can depend on the game/genre. MMO/RTS/open world/chess games tend to be more CPU-bound. But most games right now are GPU-bound because developers won't push the envelope CPU-wise with stuff like massive crowd simulation, super long draw distances, and advanced AI/pathfinding since they know they will get bottlenecked by API overhead on PC or underpowered hardware on consoles.

Currently on DX11, there is a low and hard ceiling (at ~10K draws/frame) to how many objects devs can fit into a scene at a reasonable level of performance. That's why most graphical advancements in recent years have been on the GPU side to make this limited number of objects look as pretty as possible, e.g. deferred shading, tessellation, compute shaders, etc.

In a low-level API such as DX12 and Mantle, draw calls are inherently less expensive because there is significantly less CPU cost in submitting them. It allows an order of magnitude more draws/frame at the same level of performance, which means more detailed and complex scenes with a much greater number of objects in them. It enables PC-exclusive devs and others not bound by the lowest common denominator to do more complex stuff on the CPU side. Low-level API's give them the freedom to either keep the same scene complexity but reduce CPU usage, or keep the same CPU usage but increase complexity.

Up until AC Unity, I don't think we've seen a game approach this level of NPC scale and density. Maybe Hitman: Absolution a little bit, but its Glacier 2 Engine was purpose-built for large crowd simulation and esp. NPC AI (which, you know, is kinda important in a Hitman game). And the crowds in Unity dwarf the crowds in Absolution. This is a big problem, because it means Ubisoft overextended itself and the limits of current tech in pursuit of the largest crowds of people you've ever seen in a video game.

Ubisoft actually did do a good job scaling its engine over multiple cores, it's just that they went completely overboard with the crowd simulation. I mean, come on, just look at this. It's fluff.

Spoiler

With a low-level API, the above can be possible without eating CPUs alive and causing massive performance issues on weaker ones. Or causing the visual glitches--pop-ins, abrupt LOD transitions, and stuff incorrectly rendering or failing to render altogether--that result from most of the 50K (!) draws being culled.

After you're done picking your jaw up off the floor, notice the distinct lack of detail on every NPC in the crowd. Nobody has faces or shadows, even the ones right below you closest to the camera. Undoubtedly, when you jump down, faces will magically appear around you.

 

AMD "Misspoke" Saying DirectX 12 Won't Work With Windows 7 - GameSpot

I personally believe this is what's happening:

 

Yeah, me too. Reeks of AMD P R trying to do damage control. Windows 7 mainstream support ends January 2015, I just don't see M$ throwing us a bone and backporting DX12 to the most popular OS on the planet almost a year later.

 

While off topic unless Windows 10 is a huge success then end in mainstream support of Windows 7 would be a huge mistake. While still all speculative I would not be surprised to see support extended as needed etc.. This would probably be a last resort but an option for them. So maybe there is a slight glimor of hope.