Microsoft has released a new set of official resources to help game devs port their DirectX 12-based games onto the Windows 7 operating system. Most notably this means that it will be possible to get Nvidia-supported DirectX Raytracing (DXR) games running on the older OS. To some Windows 10 users that might seem entirely unnecessary – after all Windows 7 is an operating system that’s two generations behind – but with a 32% overall market share there are still a whole lot of Win7 users, and not far behind the percentage of people running the latest version of Microsoft’s OS on their PC. And that means a lot of potential gamers are being locked out of running all those DX12-based games. All those DX 12 games… Admittedly DirectX 12 support seems to be taking a retrograde step recently, despite all the hype around Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing and Nvidia’s RTX tech, which both rely on the more modern API to function. Part of the issue is that there’s often a good chance that you get either worse performance on DX12 versus DX11, or you get a less stable gaming experience.