Lu also noted that Microsoft 'are currently working with a few other game developers to port their D3D12 games to Windows 7,' so we should see improved performance in more games too. Players will need the appropriate hardware to benefit from this, of course, but it's hardly bleeding-edge tech. Windows 7's DX12 features are now supported in World Of Warcraft as of Tuesday's update 8.1.5. That's a fair indicator that yeah, W7 is still pretty big. While hard numbers are elusive/impossible, 25% of respondents to Steam's hardware and software survey were still using on Windows 7 as of February 2019.

This unblocks developers who want to take full advantage of the latest improvements in D3D12 while still supporting customers on older operating systems.' 'Microsoft is pleased to announce that we have ported the user mode D3D12 runtime to Windows 7. 'At Microsoft, we make every effort to respond to customer feedback, so when we received this feedback from Blizzard and other developers, we decided to act on it,' Lu said. Microsoft's Graphics Team program manager, Jianye Lu, explained in Tuesday's blog post that Blizzard asked Microsoft to throw them a bone after boosting World Of Warcraft's performance with DX12 on Windows 10.

Having the exclusive lock on DX12 was one of the main ways Microsoft nudged people towards Windows 10, after all. This isn't the full DirectX 12 package and doesn't bring all the performance improvements of DX12, to be clear, but it is a nice little bonus.

World Of Warcraft is the first game to benefit from DX12 features including multithreading on Windows 7, and Microsoft say they're working with several other developers to juice their games up on Windows 7 too. Microsoft have brought some of DirectX 12's performance-improving parts to Windows 7, ending years of DX12 being exclusive to Windows 10.

Directx 12 windows 7