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DirectX 12 comes to Windows 7, nine months from retirement...
- Thread starter ubersonic
- Start date
Will be checking it out when I get home.Not really.
8.1 has half of the technical advancements of 10, but in terms of the control with the user is very similar to 7.
8.1 has suffered the same way vista did, it had a bad launch which meant its got a bad name, when windows 7 was launched vista was just as good as 7, but no one trusted it at that point, so microsoft released a vista SP4 as windows 7.
I mean you do need to use something like startisback with win 8.1, but once you do that its pretty much the same as windows 7 except its newer, and has some technical enhancements.
I dont ever remember windows 7 been labeled as spyware, the only windows OS with that rep is windows 10.
For me to make Windows 10 viable as an OS on a proper rig, the following is a minimal.
Disable feature updates or use LTS version.
Delay security updates by at least 15 days
In GP's set updates to check for updates only but not auto install.
Once you install updates, reboot right away, else you gonna get shafted by an auto reboot, the auto reboot setting in GP's seems to not get honoured.
Disable 80% of telemetry tasks in task scheduler, but not all of them, do not set telemetry to basic, as that prevents windows update defer settings from working.
Disable/remove cortana.
Install startisback or classicshell start menu.
At this point it becomes kind off viable for use.
Nothing like the level of 10 but initially there were some people who spat their dummy out over the CEIP but MS changed it all to off by default in response unlike 10.
Though that was true underneath - there are some fairly small but key changes in terms of quality of life experience i.e. repetitive tasks where relatively minor layout changes or changes to make things more intuitive or just removing 1 unnecessary step from the process meant that 7 was much better received than Vista and better to use even than updated Vista. Depending on how you use the OS those changes might have been more or less obvious - for me it made quite a difference.
I disable my auto updates completely and use a powershell script to install them. So it's fully manual and they never interrupt me. I can also skip individual updates which you can't normally do in the UI.
Caporegime
- Joined
- 8 Jul 2003
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- 30,063
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Because Microsoft have spent thirty years cornering the PC gaming market, buying devs out to use their APIs and generally being all around anti-competitive to anyone that tries to break their dominance?
will my games run ok on linex
MS are quite clearly trying to move towards a subscription model, for home users too. I think at that point there will be a switch to Linux.
They did it with Office, but actually it's now a POS and bloatware compared to Open Office which is free (including for business).
They did it with Office, but actually it's now a POS and bloatware compared to Open Office which is free (including for business).
pretty much this, if vulkan gets big or someone gets DX working properly on linux I would switch like today.
linux is also so much faster as well. Booting up a linux desktop on any of my rigs is night and day difference.
How should I know what your games are? Generally speaking all new games are running within days, many windows exclusives on steam, are running through stream play also. You can only try for yourself.
Much more to it than just games though - I use so much software that either doesn't exist on Linux or the Linux version is either way behind or lacking a lot of features compared to the Windows branch or trying to run it via stuff like WINE either doesn't work or has a lot of limitations.
Some will some wont. A lot of games I play aren't native on linux so I still use Windows 10 mainly and Ubuntu just to mess around.
As someone who was raiding in DirectX 12 last night, it's not quite perfect. WoW doesn't seem to have a fullscreen mode option (it's borderless window all the way) and this can cause my desktop to lag if I alt-tab out of it to check something on the internet. Also the game itself seems to suffer from random bouts of microstutter.
But when it runs you can clearly feel there is a performance boost to be had, especially where minimum frame rates are concerned.
Caporegime
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- 8 Jul 2003
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- 30,063
- Location
- In a house
It’s been a while and I prepared a lot of slides for DX12but generally the constraints imposed by WDDM 1.1 still apply to all low-level GPU hardware abstractions on Windows 7. In the end the Win7/WDDM 1.1 system design & policies around GPU memory management & scheduling constrain the type of application and user scenarios that low-level APIs can be successful driving on that platform. It works decent for 1-2 high resource consuming applications at a time, but the user experience does not degrade gracefully if a lot of apps running simultaneously start loading up the GPU with low-level API usage on Windows 7. That does mean there’s a number of AAA games & engines that benefit from it though. Workstation apps are another category where the user tends to run just 1 high resource consuming app at a time, but users in that category tend to go for more recent OSs as that’s where the official support channels are greatest.
Why D3D12 on Win7? We’re at the next stage for D3D12 and low-level APIs in the technology adoption curve by developers and publishers. The next order of magnitude in the title & engine population are now designing first, or *only* for low-level APIs. The devs & publishers are making a lot of tradeoffs as part of this process:
- How do they get the most fidelity, frame rate, and functionality out of the low-level API for each target platform?
- How do they reward gamers who bought high end hardware with commensurate high end experiences?
- How do they get the largest total addressable market?
- Widest variety of hardware
- On all the OS and device platforms where the gamers are
- While keeping the engineering cost within budget
There’s a measurable population of gamers in some markets that likely won’t get off of Windows 7 in time for this next wave of titles and engines on low-level APIs. D3D12 on Windows 7 is what my team did to assist developers & publishers with the engineering cost and addressable market tradeoffs they were making. Developers get to focus more time/spend less effort on making their engines & titles work better on D3D12, publishers have a reduced cost for reaching their market on Windows, gamers who are stuck on Windows 7 still get to play the games with the limits imposed by that OS, and Windows 10 gamers get a larger number of games that can more fully exploit their hardware. All together it was a solution my team was really happy to make possible.
The system constraints in Windows 7, as well as the well aged properties of the ecosystem (just think of all the random drivers & software hooking into bizarre internal methods that were never designed to be touched outside of OS code), are why we’re doing a title by title rollout at first. We need to make sure the experience is a quality one across users, developers, and publishers.
Max McMullen
Development Manager
Compute, Graphics, and AI (yes, we chose the group name in that order because the acronym was funny to us)
Microsoft
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/dx12-on-windows-7-finally.61126/#post-2062153
Oh, nostalgia. At the time of Windows 7 release, Windows XP was the best..... Come on, guys.