Microsoft widens its efforts to support DirectX 12 games on Windows 7

DirectX 12 works on Windows 7, but that wasn’t always the case. Microsoft originally only supported the newest graphics API on Windows 10 and Windows 8. But the company expanded that to Windows 7 earlier this year. This enables developers to take advantage of the technology on the older OS.

The importance of DirectX 12 is that it is a low-level API that gives developers more direct access to the video card. It is also the requisite foundation to run DirectX R, which powers the next-gen lighting technology, ray tracing.