Installing DirectX 11 Under Windows Vista

Microsoft has good reason to be pleased with its launch of Windows 7, because for one, it was fairly smooth, unlike Vista’s, and two, consumers are actually quite pleased with it. For gamers, a major technology came pre-installed with Windows 7, that of course being DirectX 11. Although once rumored to be a Windows 7 exclusive, that was put to rest shortly after the OS’ launch. Don’t expect to install it on XP, though… this is Vista and 7 only.

At this point in time, it’s difficult to install DirectX 11 if you don’t know where to look, because Microsoft has not made an installer available for public consumption at the usual sites, such as the official DirectX site. Rather, if you install DirectX from most sources, you’ll get either 9 or 10, not 11. The skeptic in me says that Microsoft is complicating the process on purpose in order to sell more Windows 7 copies, but I could be wrong. Either way, the proper installer is still too hard to track down.

So how’s the job done? You need to download what Microsoft calls a “Platform Update”, which includes a variety of updates, not only DirectX 11. Looking at the page for the download, you’ll notice mention of “Windows Graphics”, and further mention of DirectX 11. You have two options here. You could either download the entire Platform Update, or single out the DirectX 11 update. I can’t recommend either or, but I personally chose the former just because I like keeping things up to date as much as possible.

For those of you interested exclusively in DirectX 11, you can download the update here. For the rest of you, it appears that the Platform Update is now available through Windows Update, although it wasn’t a few weeks ago when I took care of it. If it’s not in your Windows Update for whatever reason, then the easiest thing to do would be to just grab the single DirectX 11 (and others if you want them) download, as Microsoft doesn’t seem to be offering the full-blown Platform Update as a single executable anymore.

There’s little reason to fuss over DirectX 11 at current time, but if you have an ATI 5000 series card, the update won’t hurt. Dirt 2 is the first game queued up for launch to take full advantage of it, and if you want to give a good benchmark a go, you could always play around with the Unigine “Heaven” benchmark, which we talked about a few weeks ago.

The Windows Graphics, Imaging, and XPS Library enables developers to take advantage of the advancements in modern graphics technologies for gaming, multimedia, imaging, and printing applications. The new features include: * Updates to DirectX to support hardware acceleration for 2D, 3D, and text-based scenarios * DirectCompute for hardware-accelerated parallel computing scenarios * XPS Library for document printing scenarios