Just a quick question which I'm having trouble getting a definitive up to date answer on;

Some demos I've been referring to use Direct2D to render onto the same back buffer as Direct3D11, making it relatively simple to render text, draw rectangular panels and so forth.

Will this work with Windows 7, or is this an exclusive Windows 8.x capability? I'd like to be able to use Direct2D to draw GUI elements, but not at the cost of losing everyone who's still on Windows 7.

Ah, thanks for the links, very helpful!

iedoc is completely correct.

To expand, this is a resource you might find helpful. My experience was to interop rendering between my game renderer (D3D 11) and our editor's WPF viewport (D3D 9), but D3D / D2D surface sharing should be basically the same in principle. We had absolutely no problems with functionality on Win 7 as a result of the implementation.

Thanks Matt, just what I wanted to hear :)