Only 64-bit Windows 7 with SP1 installed is supported. There are, however, some limits to support. There are differences in terms of API usage (D3D12 on Windows 7 uses different Present APIs), and some fence usage patterns are also unsupported. DirectML (Direct Machine Learning) is not supported under Windows 7, but all other features implemented in the October 2018 Windows 10 update are supported. There are technical differences between DX12 on Windows 7 and DX12 on Windows 10. Early adopters reported from a few days to two weeks of work to have their D3D12 games up and running on Windows 7, though the actual engineering work required for your game may vary. Therefore, the difference of Graphics Kernel found on Windows 7 still requires some game code changes, mainly around the presentation code path, use of monitored fences, and memory residency management (all of which will be detailed below). We only ported the D3D12 runtime to Windows 7.

The development guidance document (Opens in a new window) for how to move DX12 to Windows 7 actually contains some useful information on how difficult it is to get games running under the older OS and what the differences are between the two. To better support game developers at larger scales, we are publishing the following resources to allow game developers to run their DirectX 12 games on Windows 7. We have received warm welcome from the gaming community, and we continued to work with several game studios to further evaluate this work. In a short blog post pointing an array of API documents, Microsoft notes (Opens in a new window): Now, Microsoft has announced that it's expanding this program. World of Warcraft has always had a huge Chinese following, and Blizzard's decision to add DX12 support to WoW was a significant step for both the developer and the API. The reason for this allowance? Probably China. Then, earlier this year, Microsoft announced that one game - World of Warcraft - would be allowed to take advantage of the DX12 API while running Windows 7. For years, the company stuck to this stance. When Microsoft launched Windows 10, it made its stance on DirectX 12 clear: Windows 10 would be the only OS that supported the company's latest API, period.

Dx12 win7