4 ms·

There are so many "what ifs" to get to his feared state. It's hard for me to imagine Microsoft phasing out win32 (especially after the disastrous results on Win

• pjc50 10y ago
  While Win32 is hard to phase out, DirectX is more flexible and crucially not critical to business users of Windows. There was already a mini-version of this fiasco when DX11 launched for 7 but not Vista. Microsoft could quite easily say that e.g. DX16 would require UWP, distribution through the Windows store, telemetry, ad insertion, whatever. (Let's not also forget the disaster that was Games For Windows Live)
  • animal531 10y ago
    Agreed, and it's still here; you can only get DX12 with Win10. That hasn't kicked up as many waves yet because the tech has been slow to adopt.
    • douche 10y ago
      Also because DX11 is still perfectly serviceable for most applications - and DX12 is considerably more complicated. There are still new games being developed on top of DX9 today.
      • Silhouette 10y ago
        In any case, surely no game developer is going to make DX12 a hard requirement to run their PC games any time soon. Even today, Steam's hardware and software survey puts DX12-capable hardware at around 70% of their users but nearly half of those aren't running on Win10. That's after a year of Microsoft literally giving it away and it being the default OS you get preinstalled on most new PCs in stores. The pattern of adoption hasn't been entirely surprising either: a fairly rapid shift over the first six months or so after 10 came out, but then a much slower shift since then. It's going to be a long time before anyone running a modern GPU on Windows 7 can't run the latest PC games with decent results.