Direct X 11.1 is Windows 8 exclusive, no plans to retrofit
Windows 8 is to receive Direct X 11.1 exclusively, with no plans to make it available for older versions of Microsoft's OS. In response to the company's position, a Microsoft employee has discussed the move on its official forum.
Neowin reports that Microsoft employee Daniel Moth took to the Microsoft Answers forum to discuss the move, where he said, "DirectX 11.1 is part of Windows 8, just like DirectX 11 was part of Windows 7. DirectX 11 was made available for Vista .... but at this point there is no plan for DirectX 11.1 to be made available on Windows 7."
When Neowin asked for more details it was met by a Microsoft rep's response, "We have nothing further to share."
PCGamesN has added that while the move seems to lock out owners of older Windows operating systems, Direct X 11.1 doesn't add that many features to get green-eyed about - unless you're a fan of stereoscopic 3D.
The update will allow stereoscopic 3D to be viewed with compatible glasses, among other features. here's a full update list:
- Shader tracing and compiler enhancements
- Direct3D device sharing
- Check support of new Direct3D 11.1 features and formats
- Use HLSL minimum precision
- Specify user clip planes in HLSL on feature level 9 and higher
- Create larger constant buffers than a shader can access
- Use logical operations in a render target
- Force the sample count to create a rasterizer state
- Process video resources with shaders
- Extended support for shared Texture2D resources
- Change subresources with new copy options
- Discard resources and resource views
- Support a larger number of UAVs
- Bind a subrange of a constant buffer to a shader
- Retrieve the subrange of a constant buffer that is bound to a shader
- Clear all or part of a resource view
- Map SRVs of dynamic buffers with NO_OVERWRITE
- Use UAVs at every pipeline stage
- Extended support for WARP devices
- Use Direct3D in Session 0 processes