When Windows 8 was released two weeks ago, one of the operating system's features was DirectX 11.1, the latest version of Microsoft's 3D graphics API. The company has listed all of DirectX 11.1's new features on its support page, Perhaps the highest profile difference between the new version and the older DirectX 11 is that DirectX 11.1 has native stereoscopic 3D support.

That means any PC games or applications written with DirectX 11.1 will have support for viewing the content via stereoscopic 3D glasses out of the box. Previously, stereoscopic 3D support could only be added to a game or application if you were programming with a particular graphics card in mind, such as NVIDIA's GeForce cards which support its own 3D Vision software, or AMD's Radeon cards with its HD3D technology.

There are still a lot of PC users out there with Windows 7 PCs who likely won't upgrade to Windows 8 but would still like to get DirectX 11.1. Unfortunately, it's looking like Microsoft is going to keep it as an exclusive for Windows 8, along with Windows RT and Windows Server 2012.

In a recent post on the Microsoft Answers forum, Microsoft employee Daniel Moth stated, "DirectX 11.1 is part of Windows 8, just like DirectX 11 was part of Windows 7. DirectX 11 was made available for Vista .... but at this point there is no plan for DirectX 11.1 to be made available on Windows 7."

We contacted Microsoft to get an official response but a spokesperson told us, " ... we have nothing further to share."

Thanks to Winblows8 for the tip!

Source: Microsoft Answers forum | Image via Microsoft