Microsoft’s plans for the near future are somewhat clear – in the next few months the company will work on the newly announced Windows 10 operating system, which when released will come with a number of new features and improvements. We talked about most of them extensively but there’s one feature that was missed by Microsoft and only confirmed today – Windows 10 will feature DirectX 12 as well.
The new graphics API will, undoubtedly, bring a number of new functions and features that will be used by numerous programmers around the world but the question if DirectX 12 will be supported on older Windows versions remains. Things do not look good for users of Windows 7 – when this OS came along it shipped with DirectX 11, which was then released for Windows Vista, but when DirectX 11.1 came out Microsoft released some features of the new API only after Windows 8 was made available.
In a few words most likely DirectX 12 will not be compatible with Windows 7 but given that the first DirectX 12 games will appear a few years after the release of the new API, there’s no reason to worry now. In the meantime you can download a technical preview of Windows 10 before the official version goes live in late 2015.
Source: Techspot