Last week I reported - An Microsoft employee posted in Microsoft Answers forum that Microsoft will keep DirectX 11.1 as an exclusive for Windows 8, along with Windows RT and Windows Server 2012 but now on the Games for Windows and the DirectX SDK blog, the company reveals that some of DirectX 11.1 features are being made available on Windows 7 Service Pack 1 via the platform update KB 2670838 included in Internet Explorer 10 Release Preview for Windows 7. The new features are limited to the WDDM 1.1 drivers on Windows 7.
Here is a quick summary of what the update adds to Windows 7 Service Pack 1:
- ID3D11Device1, ID2D1Factory1, IDWriteFactory1, IDXGIFactory2, IWICImagingFactory2, ID3DUserDefinedAnnotation and related APIs are available. Methods that depend on WDDM 1.2 drivers or new Windows Store app APIs are not supported.
- Improved Direct3D 11 device interoperability via ID3DDeviceContextState, including the improved interop with Direct2D/DirectWrite
- D3D11_FEATURE_DATA_D3D9_OPTIONS feature detection
- In addition to the new Windows 8 WIC features, this update also fixes decoding of 96bpp floating-point TIFF images.
These DirectX 11.1 features will continue to be exclusive to Windows 8:
- Feature Level 11.1 hardware
- All D3D11_FEATURE_DATA_D3D11_OPTIONS features for Feature Level 10.x/11.0 devices
- 16bpp format support (DXGI_FORMAT_B5G6R5_UNORM, DXGI_FORMAT_B5G5R5A1_UNORM, DXGI_FORMAT_B4G4R4A4_UNORM)
- Tile-based Deferred Renderer optimizations (D3D11_FEATURE_DATA_ARCHITECTURE_INFO)
- HLSL minimum precision shader optimizations (D3D11_FEATURE_SHADER_MIN_PRECISION_SUPPORT)
- DXGI 1.2 features for Stereo, Occlusion status notifications, Desktop Duplication, and NT Handle shared resources
- Windows Store app ICoreWindow features of DXGI 1.2
- WARP support for Feature Levels 11.0 and 11.1
- Direct3D hardware support in Session 0
- The DirectComposition API
Source: Games for Windows and the DirectX SDK, KB 2670838