Windows 7: World of Warcraft players enjoy DirectX 12 boost

As there is going to be no runtime, the intent of this is I feel obvious.
To give a sampler, a taste of what Windows 10 with full DX12 support can offer.
A more tangible sample than any marketing of features is ever going to be.

Its timing alongside the nag screens is no coincidence.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by spacein_vader

Because when Wow was released in 2004 it was a DX (9?) game, so when Vulkan appeared a couple of years ago it was probably simpler to build a DX12 version than to port 12+ years of DX9/10/11 coding and bodging to a totally different API.

That'd be my guess.

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For Windows it was released as DirectX 7 I think, I certainly remember the improvement when DX9 was given as a graphics option. But I always remember there being an OpenGL path, intended I think for the Mac and on the Windows binary well hidden and only used by the Linux community. OpenGL always lagged in features, wasn't quite as pretty but it was there. Probably still is.

But back to the present day: DX12 and Vulkan are both essentially spawned from Mantle. The concepts are the same, just with DirectX you only get to run it on Windows and until now only a minority of the Windows machines out there could run it. Vulkan OTOH is even on Android phones. Basically Vulkan is about drawing graphics, DX12 is about who controls graphics and that gets my back up.

^^That^^ A PC is about more than just Windows (or at least it used to be).