Path of Exile update to ostracise Windows XP and Vista

Grinding Gear Games has recently released an announcement on their forums which states that the upcoming 3.6.0 update to Path of Exile will not support Windows XP or Vista operating systems.

The choice comes as most other game companies including Microsoft and Steam have also ended their support for the systems. Grinding Gear Games said in the announcement that "this will free up technical resources for more other impactful tasks", before asking users to upgrade to a more secure version of Windows.

Path of Exile will still support a 32-bit client but also strongly encourages users to upgrade to the 64-bit client as soon as possible. This seems as though plans to stop support for the 32-bit client may be in the works but will most likely not be put into effect for a short while.

Alongside stopping support for Windows XP and Vista, Grinding Gear Games (GGG) will also retire DirectX 9 rendering mode in favour of DirectX 11. This is due to the latter being much quicker and able to simplify lots of code when only supporting one, making the game even faster. This itself will mean players will no longer be able to choose whether or not they can disable shadows as GGG have said that "Path of Exile's game environments are designed around their shadows. Over time, we have relied more and more on shadows as a critical part of the environment, and so the game without shadows has become very different than the experience we have intended."

Will you be affected by this change?