A few days ago Hitechreview reported that Windows 7 would not get any support for DirectX 11.1, which will remain exclusive to Windows 8. It now appears, however, that Microsoft has shown some mercy to Windows 7 users, who, after all will get some support for DirectX 11.1 – although not full.
According to Microsoft’s statement some portions of DirectX 11.1 are being made available for Windows 7 SP1 via the Platform Update for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (KB 2670838) included with the Internet Explorer 10 Release Preview for Windows 7. WDDM 1.2 will remain a Windows 8 exclusive though, including support for stereoscopic 3D without additional software.
The update KB 2670838 makes the following APIs available: ID3D11Device1, ID2D1Factory1, IDWriteFactory1, IDXGIFactory2, IWICImagingFactory2, ID3DUserDefinedAnnotation and related APIs. It also adds improved Direct3D 11 device interoperability via ID3DDeviceContextState, including the improved interop with Direct2D/DirectWrite, D3D11_FEATURE_DATA_D3D9_OPTIONS feature detection and fixes the decoding of 96 bpp floating-point TIFF images.
All other features of DirectX 11.1 will remain exclusive to Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012.
Source: Guru3D