Yesterday at its much awaited event Microsoft made a few announcements that many of us were looking forward to. The consumer version of Windows 10 has finally been unveiled. Microsoft showed off the new features that it has been working on and all of the improvements that have been made to the OS. DirectX 12 was something that caught the attention of people interested in PC gaming and a report confirms that this API is exclusive to Windows 10.
What this means is that the DirectX 12 graphics API will not be available for any other iteration of the operating system except Windows 10. PC owners who are currently on Windows 7 or Windows 8 will have to upgrade their OS to take advantage of DirectX 12.
Fortunately Microsoft has tweaked its upgrade policy. Windows 10 is going to be a free upgrade for the first year only but it should give individual users ample time to jump up to the latest iteration of Microsoft’s operating system.
To take full advantage of DirectX 12 and all of the features that are included in it Rock Paper Shotgun reports that even Windows 10 users will have to upgrade their graphics cards, which are yet to be released, so that their machines can be fully compatible with the API. Though a few existing graphics cards will be able to take advantage of some of the improvements.
It is going to take a few months before Windows 10 is finally released, by that time the new graphics cards should have hit the market.
Filed in . Read more about Microsoft and Windows 10.