Some D3D11.1 got back ported to Win7 as part of a platform update, I seem to recall it being tied to an IE update too - I don't think everything made it back however (and it broke PIX, which has been fun here.. *sigh*), I seem to recall reading some features didn't work.

I should probably double check that at some point just to see where things are.

Yeah they technically back-ported the interface, but most of the new functionality was tied to DXGI 1.2 which wasn't back-ported. Not that there was much new functionality to begin with...the only really new GPU feature was UAV's from all shader stages (which you can't use on Win7).

Indeed. It's nice that we're exclusive to a console so we don't need to worry about this stuff for shipping, but it still causes problems for the Windows build of our game that we use for development. Currently we have to write and maintain expensive and/or complex fallbacks on Windows to emulate some of the things that we can do on PS4.

Bind-to-edit doesn't bother me so much with OpenGL because at least we've got EXT_direct_state_access which both AMD and NVIDIA support (and of which some parts have made it into core - such as the glProgramUniform calls; it also helps that id Software used it for textures in Doom 3 BFG so support is going to be good). The bigger-by-far problem is driver quality and consistency not being as good, and if that were to be resolved then I'd likewise be looking at it more seriously. As I said above - MS seem too eager to throw away their previous good work these days, which is a really odd thing to be doing and not in the interests of either developers or end users.

Personally I'm just glad I didn't take the proposed bet amongst friends that Chuck was the ONLY person working on D3D. Still need to open a betting pool on how many people are actually committed to that tech's development internally though.

Our GL pipeline is shared with ES devices, which means no DSA :( And driver quality, particularly on AMD, is a bitch. Crossfire is even worse.

Something far more interesting that D3D11.2 seems to be the inclusion of WebGL in IE11 - preliminary documentation here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ie/bg182648%28v=vs.85%29 - especially as it seems to be a decent, performant implementation rather than some kind of emasculated afterthought.

I just wish they lifted the 16K texture size limit at the same time as they introduced tiled ressources, wonder if they'll do that in DX12, would be really nice to just load up those high res 64-128K textures and not have to manage them.