Presumably because this is the desktop package of .NET runtime? WPF is the GPU-accelerated GUI rendering library, it makes sense that it would have a DirectX de

Presumably because this is the desktop package of .NET runtime? WPF is the GPU-accelerated GUI rendering library, it makes sense that it would have a DirectX dependency. AFAIK it has always had a DirectX dependency, just one that was met by the base install on versions of windows that were supported. I think this is just the first time a .NET upgrade has required/offered upgrading to a newer version of DirectX, instead of just raising the minimum windows version. Server/embedded/etc headless environments presumably want .NET Core instead, which added most of these updates in version 1.1 a few months back (along with VS 2017).