Are you not sure if you should stick with your older operating system or move to the new Windows 8? Microsoft just made that decision for gamers around the world after it announced that Direct X 11.1 will only be available for Windows 8 and not any of its older operating systems.
In a discussion on the MSDN forums, Daniel Moth, a Microsoft official, said that Direct X 11.1 will support Windows 8 only for all practical purposes.
What is Direct X? It is a collection of application programming interfaces that allow programmers to write code that will be generically translated into specific hardware commands. Thanks to this, programmers can write code without exactly knowing the hardware that is available on the machine to run the program.
So Microsoft is forcing gamers to move to Windows 8 or risk not being able to play upcoming games a few years from now. The news does not come as a surprise as the software giant did the same thing with its Windows Vista operating system. Unlike Windows XP, Vista came with Direct X 10. So consumers were forced to switch to Windows Vista if they wanted to play games based on Direct X 10.
But the silver lining is that most games today still use Direct X 9 and developers will now start basing games on Direct X 11, since there are a large number of Windows 7 users out there. Also, Direct X 11.1 isn't very different from older versions. Its only real addition is the support for native stereoscopic 3D, a feature that a vast majority of gamers don't care about at the moment. So yes, Windows 7 should be good for a few more years until game developers decide to move to Direct X 11.1 themselves.
For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com
Technology News
June 05, 2026 16:18 ET A busy week for economic news flow saw a slew of reports being released that reflected the trends in the U.S. labor market. In Europe, economic growth and inflation data gained attention as the European Central Bank and Bank of England head for policy session later in the month. In Asia, the monetary policy session of the Indian central bank was in focus as the country, a major oil importer, reels under the pressures of a weaker rupee and rising inflation.