World of Warcraft can be played on Windows 7 with DirectX 12

Based on a request from Blizzard, Microsoft has released support that allows World of Warcraft players on a Windows 7 system to use DirectX 12.

Microsoft has announced that support for DirectX 12 on Windows 7 systems is now available as part of the released game patch 8.1.5 for World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth. This makes World of Warcraft the first game on Windows 7 to have support for DirectX 12, although Microsoft reports that a few other games are currently being worked on to make the same possible. Microsoft is not giving any further details on this yet.

Blizzard already released DirectX 12 support for World of Warcraft for Windows 10 at the end of 2018. According to Blizzard, this had positive effects on performance, which led the company to work with Microsoft, among others, to make this possible for Windows 7 users as well. Players can expect significantly higher frame rates, which is partly due to a DirectX 12 element as multi-threading. The company emphasizes that the experience will always be better on Windows 10 due to the optimizations that are in this version of the operating system.

World of Warcraft players who want to use DirectX 12 on Windows 7 must have the latest graphics drivers and a GPU that supports DirectX 12 on Windows 7. This may need to be enabled first in the advanced system settings in the ‘graphics api’ section.

In addition to the expanded support for DirectX 12, Blizzard has added two new races for the Alliance with the current game update: Kul Tiran Humans and the Zandalari Trolls. In addition, new quests have been added and a new raid with two bosses will be available from April 16: Crucible of Storms.