While Windows 7, the newest incarnation of Microsoft’s OS, will feature innate support for DirectX 11, also the latest incarnation of Microsoft’s DirectX series, Vista users who were already running compatible hardware had to sweat it out with older versions. Not anymore, according to Microsoft’s update website.

Microsoft has already begun to roll out the platform update KB971644, which among other things, offers Windows Vista users native support for DirectX 11, provided that their hardware is compatible, and that the users are already running Vista SP2.

While DirectX 11 is not exactly a big leap from Microsoft’s DirectX 10.1 already supported in Vista SP2 systems (DirectX 11 is a superset of DirectX 10.1), the latest version however makes use of the newer versions of Microsoft’s WDDM, already supported in Windows 7, and is basically a souped-up version of the memory management system present in Microsoft’s operating systems – allowing for better memory budgeting and allocating.

Unfortunately, Windows XP users will have to make do with DirectX 9.0c, as Microsoft makes it plainly clear that there would be no future support for XP in the latest series of DirectX updates.

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