Some DirectX 11.1 features coming to Windows 7 after all

We reported a few days ago that that Microsoft will not be bringing DirectX 11.1 to Windows 7.

It now appears that IE10, which uses hardware graphics acceleration in Windows 8, will be dragging along some DirectX 11. features along with it when it comes to Windows 7.

In a post on the Games for Windows and the DirectX SDK blog today, Microsoft revealed that some of the features of DirectX 11.1 will be coming to Windows 7 as part of Tuesday’s preview version of Internet Explorer 10.

Windows 7 and  Windows Server 2008 R2 will get:

ID3D11Device1, ID2D1Factory1, IDWriteFactory1, IDXGIFactory2, IWICImagingFactory2, ID3DUserDefinedAnnotation and related APIs are available
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. 

However the following features will not be coming to the older platform:

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

Are our readers satisfied? Let us know below.

Via Neowin.net