Although Microsoft last week said that graphics software DirectX 11.1 will be exclusively avalable on Windows 8, a patch would add some parts of the new software to not Windows 7 SP1 systems.

Windows 8 includes an updated "DirectX 11.1 Runtime" that supports Direct3D 11.1, updates Direct2D and DirectWrite, DXGI 1.2, and a revision of the Windows Imaging Component (WIC).

Portions of the "DirectX 11.1 Runtime" are being made available on Windows 7 Service Pack 1 via the Platform Update for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (KB 2670838) included with the Internet Explorer 10 Release Preview for Windows 7. This includes the updated components above, but is limited to WDDM 1.1 drivers on Windows 7.

KB 2670838 is installed as part of the IE10 Release Preview for Windows 7 download. It is also available as a standalone prerelease update.

Here is a quick summary of what KB 2670838 adds to Windows 7 Service Pack 1 / Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1:
- ID3D11Device1, ID2D1Factory1, IDWriteFactory1, IDXGIFactory2, IWICImagingFactory2, ID3DUserDefinedAnnotation and related APIs are available. Methods that depend on WDDM 1.2 drivers or new Windows Store app APIs are not supported.
- Improved Direct3D 11 device interoperability via ID3DDeviceContextState, including the improved interop with Direct2D/DirectWrite
- D3D11_FEATURE_DATA_D3D9_OPTIONS feature detection - In addition to the new Windows 8 WIC features, this update also fixes decoding of 96bpp floating-point TIFF images.

All other features of DirectX 11.1 are Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012 only.