#Download directx runtime for windows 7 upgrade#
#Download directx runtime for windows 7 windows 7#

The current DirectX9 renderer hasnвЂ™t been altered in any significant way. Supporting more than one of these backends would balloon QA work for little tangible benefits. As far as graphics features are concerned, jumping from DirectX9 to DirectX11 gives us plenty of options for adding interesting features to the engine in years to come.

#Download directx runtime for windows 7 windows 7#

It allows us to provide support back to Windows Vista, while Vulkan support starts at Windows 7 and DirectX12 support starts at Windows 10. DirectX11 is very stable and has already been used by thousands of games for nearly a decade at this point. We chose to use DirectX11 instead of DirectX12 or Vulkan because we found that switching to BGFXвЂ™s DirectX11 implementation provided enough of a performance boost that the graphics backend was no longer ever a limiting factor for client performance. ArenaNet has and will continue to contribute to the development of BGFX. You can learn more about it on their official website.ДЄs the graphics ecosystems in the computer industry continue to evolve, BGFX allows us to work together as a community of rendering engineers, rather than all of us having to reinvent the wheel at every studio. BGFX is well-written and supports various graphics backends and is already used in many games industry-wide. Upgrading to DirectX11 is the first step toward being able to do more shiny things.ДЄfter careful research we decided to integrate the open source rendering library BGFX into GuildВ WarsВ 2. GuildВ WarsВ 2 has been live for nine years now and implementing some DirectX11-dependent features can help the game continue to look beautiful over time.ДirectX11 also offers some modern technology options that arenвЂ™t available in DirectX9. We pinpointed that sometimes the game could stall waiting for rendering work to complete.

#Download directx runtime for windows 7 upgrade#

So why did we decide to upgrade to DirectX11 in the first place? Client performance is a priority for us, and we want everyone to be able to play with the highest possible framerate.

The change takes effect after restarting the game. You can opt-in to the beta in-game in the Graphics Options menu.

In this post I am going to go over some of the high-level technical decisions that were made to determine the shape of this project, as well as a walkthrough of our graphics runtime and how the DirectX11 renderer affects performance. DirectX11 support is a project that has been a long time in the making. This is James Fulop, Senior Engine Programmer on the GuildВ WarsВ 2 team.