AMD Chief Gaming Scientist Richard Huddy gave a brief scare during his presentation at PDXLAN, reporting that consumers still love Windows 7, which claims 52 percent of the Windows operating system market. And although that number continues to grow, Microsoft will not bring DirectX 12 to the platform.
According to the Steam Hardware Survey, 95 percent of Steam users play on a Windows platform. Of that group, 47.78 percent use the 64-bit version of Windows 7, followed by Windows 8.1 64-bit (21.43 percent), Windows 7 (11.73 percent), Windows 8 64-bit (7.01 percent), and Windows XP 32-bit (4.08 percent). Yes, some gamers still use Windows XP.
Microsoft introduced DirectX 12 back in March. The API will be closer to the hardware than what was seen with DirectX 11 and older, enabling better performance in games that utilize the API. Microsoft's Matt Sandy said in a blog that DirectX 12 will run on many GPUs currently on the market, which should be good news for PC gamers who feared they may need to upgrade their graphics cards.
So far, we know that DirectX 12 will ship with Windows 10 next year and will work on a number of devices such as the Xbox One, PCs, smartphones and tablets. Whether Windows 7 will get the DirectX 12 treatment is unknown at this point. However, AMD went out of its way over the weekend to correct the mess made by Huddy's remarks, saying that he "misspoke."
According to the company, AMD's gaming scientist does not speak for Microsoft; he was merely speculating when he said that DirectX 12 is not coming to Windows 7.
"He was unfortunately speculating from Microsoft's publication of key dates and milestones for Windows 7 lifecycle and mainstream support policy," an AMD representative said. "Richard has no special insight into Microsoft's Windows or DirectX roadmaps. Microsoft is a key, strategic partner for AMD and we're continuously collaborating with them on DirectX 12."
Given how gamers still flock to Windows 7, not supporting games running on that platform seems a little insane. Sure, we can see Microsoft holding off on the DirectX 12 release until Windows 10 goes gold, but there's just too much business on Windows 7 at this present time to ignore the platform completely.
Then again, Microsoft stopped selling OEM versions of Windows 7 Home (Basic, Premium and Ultimate) at the end of October 2014. The end of mainstream support will take place on January 13, 2015 followed by the end of extended support in January 14, 2020. Perhaps this is why there's an assumption that DirectX 12 won't come to Windows 7.
Are you looking forward to DirectX 12? Are you still running on Windows 7?
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