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Also, in-game reflections get to look amazing. In return, you get much more realistic lighting and shadow effects that you wouldn’t otherwise get. In a nutshell, ray tracing is a technique used by GPUs to track paths of light rays in a scene. The first major feature that DirectX 12 Ultimate promises to change is Ray Tracing. If you're not, you may still be able to experience DirectX 12 on Windows 7 depending on what other games Microsoft is working on porting.Also Read: How To Improve Gaming Performance on Your Laptop If you're a World of Warcraft player on Windows 7, you can check out Azeroth in DirectX 12 now. DirectX 12 itself isn't getting released Windows 7, so titles that get the API ported to the near-end of life OS will almost certainly have a performance hit compared to running the same game in Windows 10. Of course, it wouldn't be a Microsoft post talking about Windows 7 without trying to implore holdouts to upgrade their operating systems to Windows 10. Instead, the announcement says they're working with "a few other game developers," and we'll just have to wait for more information to find out what games are coming next. Other games are in the process of being ported, but Microsoft didn't give us any hints as to which studios they're working with. A fifteen year-old game with an engine that's basically held together by duct tape at this point seems like an odd choice for Microsoft to work with first, but World of Warcraft is the first and currently only title that allows Windows 7 gamers to use DirectX 12. So far, the only game to take advantage of the DirectX 12 port initiative is World of Warcraft, and that support was only enabled with yeterday's update to patch 8.1.5. There are apparently enough holdouts that Microsoft decided to start working with various developers to port DirectX 12 games to Windows 7. Not everyone's jumped aboard the Windows 10 train yet, with many PC owners sticking it out with Windows 7 for varying reasons. It even enabled the ultimate taboo for PC gamers: being able to use your NVIDIA and AMD GPUs at the same time.
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DirectX 12 was a big draw for PC gamers in getting them to upgrade to Windows 10 a few years back.
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