Microsoft has confirmed that if you want DirectX 11.1 support or higher when it is released in the future, you will have to upgrade to Windows 8. While the company claims that DirectX 11 was “retro-fitted” to run on Vista, the company has no plans to do the same for DirectX 11.1 for Windows 7.

We see this decision as a big mistake, and it can’t help but look like a ploy by Microsoft to force gamers to upgrade to Windows 8, despite the fact that there really is likely no technical reason that Windows 7 could not support DirectX 11.1.

The good news (if there is any) about this move is that developers will not likely approve of Microsoft’s  news that it will not support Windows 7 users, as they make up the majority of the gaming market, and the DirectX 11 support and feature set will be just fine and it will take a while for consumers to get the latest video cards that support the 11.1 features and gamers that do offer such support.

The biggest feature of DirectX 11.1 is that it adds native stereoscopic 3D support, which gives native 11.1 applications support for viewing the content via 3D stereoscopic glasses by default, as it is built-in. In the past, the only way to get such support was for the developer to code this support into the game for each specific card. It is hard to determine if this is something that gamers will consider a must-have feature and something that developers will feel needs to be included in their games. It will, however, make stereoscopic 3D development much easier to do using DirectX 11.1, and there is no debating that.