NEWS
by Mark Barley
DirectX 11.1 to be exclusive to Windows 8
Microsoft have announced that DirectX 11.1 will be exclusive to Windows 8 with no plans to bring it to older versions of Microsoft's OS'.
Microsoft employee Daniel Moth spoke out on the move through the Microsoft Answers forum, stating;
“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.”
Neowin spoke with Microsoft asking for more details but was met with the standard response of, “We have nothing further to share.”PCGamesN points out that while the exclusivity will pretty much bar older Windows operators from using the DirectX 11.1, the upgrade doesn't really upgrade all that much except Stereoscopic 3D.
Here's what you'll get with the upgrade:
- 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