Battle for Azeroth already supported the DX12 API for Windows 10 users and those on Windows 7 will now also be able to take benefit from the DX12 performance gains on GPUs that support the support API on Windows 7.

“After seeing such performance wins for their gamers running DirectX 12 on Windows 10, Blizzard wanted to bring wins to their gamers who remain on Windows 7, where DirectX 12 was not available”, Microsoft writes on its official DirectX developers blog.

“Today, with game patch 8.1.5 for World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard becomes the first game developer to use DirectX 12 for Windows 7! Now, Windows 7 WoW gamers can run the game using DirectX 12 and enjoy a framerate boost, though the best DirectX 12 performance will always be on Windows 10, since Windows 10 contains a number of OS optimizations designed to make DirectX 12 run even faster.”

Alongside support for DX12 in Windows 7, Battle for Azeroth’s 8.1.5 patch also comes with improvements to how World of Warcraft uses DirectX. Players using older operating systems or GPUs that don’t support DX12, can now make use of a new multi-threaded rendering backend using DX11, which should improve performance over the ‘old’ single-threaded rendering backend.

“In essence, our old DirectX 11 is now called DirectX 11 Legacy, and our new DirectX 11 is multi-threaded”, Blizzard explains.

We’ve included the changes to the DirectX API below:

DirectX 11 Legacy
A single-threaded rendering backend. This is provided to be the most compatible with older hardware, operating systems, and drivers. This is also the least performant. This is very similar to the functionality of DirectX 11 in 8.0.1.

DirectX 11
A new multi-threaded rendering backend using DirectX 11. This should improve performance for older GPUs or operating systems that don’t support DirectX 12. This is new for 8.1.5.

DirectX 12
A multi-threaded rendering backend using DirectX 12 for hardware, drivers, and operating systems that support it. There are some performance improvements in 8.1.5, but it is mainly the same as the 8.1.0 release.

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth is available globally now.

In other WoW News, Jaina Proudmore Encounter Nerfed in Battle of Dazar’alor Raid Through Latest WoW: Battle for Azeroth Hotfix

Blizzard has released a new World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth hotfix for patch 8.1.5 that reduces the difficulty of the Jaina Proudmore encounter in the Battle of Dazar’alor raid.

The latest hotfix reduces Jaina’s health by 5% on all difficulties. On mythic difficulty, the health of her Tide Elemental has also been reduced by 35%, and Jaina’s Chilling Touch Damage has been nerfed by 10%.

In addition to the Jaina encounter nerfs, the hotfix also fixes several visual issues and aims to improve realm performance.

We’ve included the release notes for this new hotfix down below:

World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth hotfix March 12 release notes

Dungeons and Raids
Battle of Dazar’alor
Lady Jaina Proudmoore
-Jaina’s health reduced by 5% on all difficulties.
-Jaina’s Tide Elemental health reduced by 35% on Mythic difficulty.
-Jaina’s Chilling Touch damage reduced by 10% on Mythic difficulty.

Textures and Animations
Fixed several visual issues such as missing targeting reticles and Hunters’ Barrage, which again has its intended visual.

System
Applied updates to improve realm performance, which are rolling out over a period of a few hours. No downtime is expected. We continue to monitor latency as these updates are applied.

Last month, Blizzard reverted an unintentional hotfix that increased the difficulty of the Jaina encounter. “Earlier today, we applied a hotfix that unintentionally increased the difficulty of the Jaina encounter”, community manager Aerythlea wrote last month. “That hotfix has since been reverted.”

Battle for Azeroth’s latest content update, patch 8.1.5 Crucible of Storms, was released yesterday.