This announcement means absolutely nothing. First of all, how many years after Vista's release was it before a handful of games started requiring DX10? Three? Maybe four? How many games do you know that require DX11? None come to mind. It would be financial suicide for a developer to only support DX11 right now, or DX11.1 or DX11.2 for that matter. So whatever version of DirectX that Windows 8.1 is going to support is absolutely irrelevant to the vast majority of users for the next several years. By the time it matters, I will have already migrated to Windows 9 or 10.

Secondly, DX11.1 and DX11.2 bring absolutely nothing of interest to the table. Remember DX10.1? Yeah, neither does anyone else. Small feature upgrades are not something that developers rush to support. DX11.2 itself is a joke. First of all, the extra video memory means very little since most games aren't exceeding the available memory on modern gaming hardware. If a game is exceeding it then your hardware is already obsolete. What serious gamers are still using 256MB video cards anymore? Besides, has anyone heard of Hypermemory? It's been around for ages, and not just for embedded graphics solutions. It does exactly what DX11.2 does. You don't have it? Well then upgrade to AMD and you will. At the moment I have an HD7870 which is equipped with 2GB of GDDR. My PC also has 32GB of DDR3-1866. I'm certainly not using all that memory for applications but my Catalyst drivers do take advantage of it. Yep I have almost 20GB of video memory, most of it coming from main memory... and nary a Win8.1 in sight. All I needed was Win7 x64 Ultimate Edition so that it can address more than 16GB of installed RAM. You don't have Ultimate Edition? That's ok because every edition of Win7 x64 still supports more than enough for a nice boost in video memory. MS can shove their announcement up their ass.

The point is that nobody is shafted by using Win7. If you want or have Win8 or 8.1 then great for you, and yes it does have some nice under-the-hood improvements but for gamers it still means very little. A framerate difference of only 1-2% improvement at best on high-end hardware is not something I am going to upgrade for.

I'm not faulting the OP for mentioning a legitimate article, but I am faulting MS for making such a bullshit press release. They got burned on the XBone and they know it. It's time for some damage control and FUD, baby!

TLDNR: You can safely ignore the MS announcement.

edit: I added some citations for clarity. Also, here are some benchmarks that Google turned up. Actually I just realized that these show Win8 as being a little slower (which was not my intention) but you can Google your own results. I'm sure that some of the lost performance here is due to drivers not being fully optimized for Win8.

I wouldn't have a problem if the whole UI wasn't forced to work as if i had a touchscreen, or i'd need to look deep into the OS to find features which in the last OS were 4 clicks away.

Yeah Win 8 really isn't as bad as people make it out to be. Although if you have Win7 it's probably not worth getting Win8. This is probably a way of them trying to make Win8 more appealing to people.

The problem with Win8 is that the layout it's more suitable for tablets than PCs

luckily my graphics card has 3gb vram i wont really need the extra vram for a while, directx11.2 wont really help me, so I am fine with windows 7

I'll go to Win8 too eventually. Win 8.1 is coming out later this year and it'll fix some things.
This isn't really a problem.
When Vista came out it was bad. And they pulled the same shit. DX10 ran only on Vista. But they patched it and by SP2 it was a pretty good OS.

Windows 8 gave me a handful FPS boost on all my games.

I feel like I'm free from such the slow and clunky mess Windows 7 was.

And Metro isn't as bad as everyone says. No one likes it because everyone is afraid of change. It's just like Facebook Timeline. When it was optional, no one used it because everyone thought it was crap. When everyone was forced to, it gradually became familiar and easy to use. The old design became ugly.

IMO the people that hate Metro with the only reason being "it's different, different things are bad" are the same people that hate Diablo 3 because it isn't a Diablo 2 remake. Fear of change is one of the worst fears.

Same here, win 8 for half a year now, works like a charm, and I've noticed about 20% performance boost in games. Don't judge win8 without trying it. P.s. I recommend Classic Shell to get rid of the annoying dashboard and to have start menu.

What I do wonder, on the other hand, is if we will need to get new gpu with dx 11.2 or will our gpus that support dx11 be able to just use this new one also...

You're right there, that was my judgement talking. Main thing about 8 is that fundamentally, i see (and saw) no need for an upgrade in the first place; that, plus the change in the UI, which to me seems to be aimed more towards mobile devices, is something that's not quite appaling.

It's that same idiocy as 4chan cretins claiming XP was better than Vista and 7.

But ... it has failed me o.o

I'm using a 64bit Win 8 Single Language, and the problem is compatibility. It seems it's having a hard time playing old time games, like Serious Sam Classic, when I can run it fine on my Win 7 64bit machine.

Is Win 8 meant to be advanced, without looking back?

Windows 8 has compatibility problems + my personal account which was tied in "users" was broken one time, so I could not use metro apps. (I fixed it with creating new user but it was bad.)

Ubisoft's games are games? O:

Unbelievable.

Or maybe just install Windows 8 cause that "crack" thing will never happen?

Yes that's something i'm wondering myself as well, maybe they're caching the RAM, rendering, and instantly swapping it? or pre-allocating it in order to avoid those bottlenecks? I'll find that out sooner or later.

DirectX 9 is for Windows XP.
DirectX 10 is for Windows Vista.
DirectX 11 is for Windows 7.
DirectX 11.1 is for Windows 8.

Lol man you censored your first swearing but then wrote f*ck without censoring, what's the point haha

and what does *** even mean?

nothing serious man :D

If your computer is wooden then yes it's just slightly faster, if you got gaming pc with high end video card and ssd then it's 200 light years faster than win7/vista

People hate Win8 because Matro AND because GabeN told them to. Obey your master, or no Summer Sale.

Yeah, but I don't want to give them money so that they can point at it and say "look, people like it, let's continue with this metro shit"

Dont let the door hit you on the back while you bend for Apple or Linux :3

A part of DX11.1 functionality was added to Windows 7. So far it seems that this won't happen with 11.2, but there's still a chance that it will.

Still, I imagine that tiled resources won't be made available for Windows 7.

Yeah directx updates being limited to newer windows is not a new concept, people just love complaining about windows 8.

Because all games are released for Linux as well.

Just scrap your PC and quit whining.
Fix'd :3

I'm using Windows 8 since like 2012 september, and it's awesome...way better then Windows 7 in my opinion.

Typing in the few characters in the start menu was a feature even in Vista :/

Windows 7 outdated, lol you so funny troll.
You kinda confused "outdated" and "desktop"
You can use that mobile crap your self. No one cares

Yeah, everyone seems to forget that the PS3 was 100.00 USD more than the 360 at launch.

And to be technical...since Microsoft announced their price first...Sony is the one charging less than the competition. :-P

Exactly. As beautiful as XP was and as much as I miss it already in just three months without it, times have changed and people should move on.

That's what makes me feel a bit better, it will hopefully take a while before they really start using said features. Up until then, i'll stick with Win7 for as long as i can.

Oh the irony...

lolollolo !!!!1111 m$$$$$