pretty much the title I’m starting to think Microsoft have no idea what they are doing them selves especially since win 7 is losing support in january 
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Windows 7 is 29% of PC gamers according to the latest steam survey. And remember the Win10 upgrade push, where they literally forced people to upgrade against their will. Even after all that, 29% of the population googled how to stop the upgrades and went to the trouble to do all that stuff.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam?platform=pc
I do think they’re probably going to extend support again.
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if they do I bet LTT is going to be annoyed since they uploaded a video recently about what to do with win 7 ending support in january
They are doing this because they know a large portion of people are still using the OS. Also why would anyone complain about this? More is good. If you don’t use Windows 7 so be it but I do and based on what Ruffalo said quite few do. I appreciate MS doing something that they didn’t have to do.
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true but it doesnt make much sense especially because I swear they used DX12 as a bit of a marketing tool to get gamers to upgrade to win 10 from 7 or 8
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Indeed, but that was always BS and everybody knew it. This just proves that.
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That akward moment when Linux has DirectX 12 support before Windows 7…
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wait since when and how 
also I bet win 7 always had support they just didnt enable it or didnt update win 7 with something for DX12
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Microsoft have not ported DX12 to Windows 10 per se, they only enabled a back-port with WoW. In all likelihood, Microsoft will most likely only enable DX12 to specific games if a game developper ask it (and possibly for sum), and not to the whole OS.
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Apart from this beeing odd, there is still a significant userbase who is sticking with “the best Windows ever made” (slogan when Win7 launched).
Support for Win7 “ends” in 2020. Until then, I will book this as:
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If future updates will bring more “nagging” issues, (basically, ads for getting Windows 10 closer to the EOL date, rather than getting 10 for you) I’m still not gonna turn on Windows Update.
Edit: Wow, they actually are doing this:
https://www.askwoody.com/2019/gwx-redux-were-going-to-get-upgrade-to-win10-nag-notices-in-win7/
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Miserable scumbags.
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Microsoft: no consistency in
- UI
- OS support policy
- API support policy
- update content policy
Maybe it is something to do with future plans to improve game compatibility via running titles in a Windows 7 VM or such. Or an effort to kill vulkan, which DOES run in Windows 7 and does basically what DX 12 does. So there’s no incentive to code for DX12 in a world where Vulkan exists and is usable on 7 but DX12 is not.
Based on prior history, i’d say this is “shots fired” in Vulkan’s direction. So much for the new “open” Microsoft.
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I think its mainly to sandbag vulkan by playing a numbers game myself
which isnt going to work…
because android supports vulkan
so vulkan has the much bigger numbers 
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Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
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Low level graphics APIs still have the big hurdle to overcome that many studios won’t spend the time to optimize for the API unless a ton of money is spent on engine programmers. Imagine if Sony spent the money to invest in Vulkan on PS4… You’d have Uncharted/Horizon: Zero Dawn level engine optimizations now part of the Vulkan development pool… but Sony is sticking to OpenGL ES…
This is kinda interesting and weird to say the least.
Not sure why MS would even do it.
Sure, but that is somewhat tangential.
If someone is not going to update their engine, fair enough. They’re outside the scope of this issue.
However right now, people are porting engines to low-level graphics APIs for improved performance. Performance is roughly equivalent across Vulkan/DX12/Metal (they’re all low level) so it will come down to market share vs. convenience.
Essentially, the market share right now for the “native” low level API (desktop only - microsoft is nowhere in mobile so for their purposes, irrelevant at the moment with regards to DX12) is
- Vulkan (Windows 7 + Linux = say 35-40% of the market)
- DX12 (50% of the desktop/laptop market based on windows 10 deployment stats)
- Metal (10% of the market - and mostly/probably half Macbooks, which aren’t gaming machines - most macbooks are likely running intel GPUs only)
So, Vulkan is nearly half of it. No DX12 on Window 7 = ignore vulkan and you ignore Windows 7 users for low level. And right now that’s say 30% of the market. (best guess 35-40 if you also include linux).
Port DX12 to Windows 7 and DX12’s share goes from 50% at best to say 85% (Vulkan “availability” stays at 35-40 but where it is “required” drops to 5-10% at best) and people maybe don’t bother to port to Vulkan any more because DX12 is built into their development tool-chain (which for most game developers would probably be Visual C++ on Windows).
Kill vulkan and you kill linux as a viable gaming platform in the future.
Consoles? Mobile? You’re already dealing with a heap of other vendor specific stuff and the market is generally pretty big so i’d say the overhead is “Acceptable” for a third party developer to bother there.
It’s a simple numbers game…
Looking at it this way, Microsoft porting DX12 to Windows 7 (which probably wasn’t much effort at all) makes total sense from a marketshare protection/capture/retention perspective.
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Like they tried with DX10 and Vista. Still extremely salty over the Unreal Tournament 3 fiasco.
A real problem with this is that so many people want to stay on Win7 and new hardware won’t comply. I was reading elsewhere recently about someone going down this path trying all sorts of things to get Win7 working on a current motherboard to no avail. It’s nice for the people in the center of the Venn diagram of gamer, Win7, older hardware that works fine with Win7 but still capable of playing new games to their satisfaction. Unfortunately for the poor souls that try to cling to Win7 and upgrade their gear, things likely won’t be smooth sailing, and new hardware will only become more difficult to get working.
This rant has been in my head since reading about that person’s Win7 ordeal
Rant
It reminds me of going with some friends to the house of some old guy back in 2001. He was a really cool dude who had just come back from racing in Daytona and talked about some things on his trip of interest to me as I was about to move to Jacksonville. During the conversation he talked about his new truck he used to haul his car. The mind is a terrible organ to shovel, but as I recall he had some sensor problem and it would have cost a ton of money had it not been under warranty.
Eventually the topic evolved into hate towards fuel injection and how he would only have it on his truck to haul his cars and never wanted to learn to work with fuel injection. This made perfect sense for him, keep a reliable new vehicle under warranty for regular tasks and all of his other toys had carburetors. He was retired, had plenty of cars with carbs to tinker with, and plenty of money to always have a new vehicle someone else was responsible for fixing.
We left and my friends went on about the same rant. I noticed tons of shade-tree mechanics doing the same thing, treating fuel injection as this new-fangled witchcraft to be feared and reviled. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to having to deal with it and learn all of the new stuff.
Shortly after moving to Florida, my mom got '90 Grand Marquis for $1k and gave her old car to my brother. I knew that if she could get a fuel injected car that cheap that all of her future cars would also have fuel injection (they did), and all of my brother’s future cars would have fuel injection (they did), and that I would be responsible for these vehicles (I am), so burying my head in the sand was not an option. I knuckled down and started learning how to work on computer controlled vehicles.
I could have thrown my hands in the air or temporarily avoided it and pretended like I didn’t need to move on with the hardware changes, but that likely would have ended poorly with unnecessary grief and money spent on some mechanic I don’t trust. I realize these aren’t completely parallel because with Win7 people want ‘muh privacy’ (Linux + no internet), or ‘muh Media Center’ (uhhh, WINE? I dunno I don’t use that Media Center crap), or whatever keeps people from moving on, but when I read about people clinging on for way longer than the rest of the world I see the faces of all of these people from the past. And I see them as they were in 2001 because I didn’t allow myself to be held back by them any longer.
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Vulkan actually has WIndows 8 and 10 support as well through nVidia/AMD drivers, not to mention Vulkan-to-D12 layers. So right now it has 90% support for the desktop market, PLUS 80-85% of the Smartphone market.
So yes, this seems like an attempt to give DX12 bigger market share.
Once again, MS is thinking short term and in so doing steamrolls all other alternatives just to have their tech matter the most. If only game devs would wisen up to this behavior…
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