Also discussed here: https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/world-of-warcraft-now-supports-dx12-in-win7.425710/ https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/didnt-see-this-coming.425715/

I actually installed Win10 mainly because of Gears of War4 and Forza, so it would be nice to port them to Win7 too.. but it would need to do something with WUP, port it too or bypass it..

Me too, I would love to play Forza on Windows 7

Breach of EOL policy!

"It’s been a while and I prepared a lot of slides for DX12 🙂 but generally the constraints imposed by WDDM 1.1 still apply to all low-level GPU hardware abstractions on Windows 7. In the end the Win7/WDDM 1.1 system design & policies around GPU memory management & scheduling constrain the type of application and user scenarios that low-level APIs can be successful driving on that platform. It works decent for 1-2 high resource consuming applications at a time, but the user experience does not degrade gracefully if a lot of apps running simultaneously start loading up the GPU with low-level API usage on Windows 7. That does mean there’s a number of AAA games & engines that benefit from it though. Workstation apps are another category where the user tends to run just 1 high resource consuming app at a time, but users in that category tend to go for more recent OSs as that’s where the official support channels are greatest. Why D3D12 on Win7? We’re at the next stage for D3D12 and low-level APIs in the technology adoption curve by developers and publishers. The next order of magnitude in the title & engine population are now designing first, or *only* for low-level APIs. The devs & publishers are making a lot of tradeoffs as part of this process: How do they get the most fidelity, frame rate, and functionality out of the low-level API for each target platform? How do they reward gamers who bought high end hardware with commensurate high end experiences? How do they get the largest total addressable market? Widest variety of hardware On all the OS and device platforms where the gamers are While keeping the engineering cost within budget There’s a measurable population of gamers in some markets that likely won’t get off of Windows 7 in time for this next wave of titles and engines on low-level APIs. D3D12 on Windows 7 is what my team did to assist developers & publishers with the engineering cost and addressable market tradeoffs they were making. Developers get to focus more time/spend less effort on making their engines & titles work better on D3D12, publishers have a reduced cost for reaching their market on Windows, gamers who are stuck on Windows 7 still get to play the games with the limits imposed by that OS, and Windows 10 gamers get a larger number of games that can more fully exploit their hardware. All together it was a solution my team was really happy to make possible. The system constraints in Windows 7, as well as the well aged properties of the ecosystem (just think of all the random drivers & software hooking into bizarre internal methods that were never designed to be touched outside of OS code), are why we’re doing a title by title rollout at first. We need to make sure the experience is a quality one across users, developers, and publishers." Max McMullen Development Manager Compute, Graphics, and AI (yes, we chose the group name in that order because the acronym was funny to us) Microsoft https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2062153/

The constraints he talks about are nonsense, this will be directx12 on an operating system that works properly with real exclusive fullscreen mode, and no memory hogging stand by list.

Astyanax:

The constraints he talks about are nonsense, this will be directx12 on an operating system that works properly with real exclusive fullscreen mode, and no memory hogging stand by list.

Exclusive mode is just a heritage of early pre-DirectX era (Windows 95 and before). In Windows 10 there is no difference between borderless and fullscreen except 1 or 2 kernel calls (and those kernel calls make the transition between DWM and fullscreen a little less responsive compared to the borderless and nothing more), the performance are the same. The constraints he talks about, which probably you are not aware (I cited a couple of old slides under NDA), are about how resources are tracked and exposed in the two different driver models (WDDM 1.x vs 2.x) and the different solution needed to manage them in a low-level and low-overhead API (hint: what can work with WDDM 1.x can work also on WDDM 2.x but at lower efficiency, viceversa WDDM 2.x soluition is not technically available on WDDM 1.x). As external people we can of course speculate, and only speculate, about the pressure of big studios for bringing such APIs on Windows 7, nothing more.

Trust me... no game developer is going to drop Windows 7 any time soon.....(huge profit loss) https://sytereitz.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/shoot_yourself_in_the_foot.jpg