r/SurfaceGaming

So recently, I wanted to test out the performance of Final Fantasy VII Remake on my Surface Pro 11th Edition with the X Elite Chip. I had seen videos on youtube that showed it working, but when I tried to boot it recently, I got an error that DirectX was required. I knew that DirectX was installed, checked dxdiag and that showed fine, and other games that require DirectX were working with no issues. I tried forcing dx11 through steam and egs, both were showing the same issue (testing abzu on egs and ffvii remake on steam).

Eventually, I decided to pull the nuclear option and reinstalled windows, and tada, it worked again! I could play FFVII remake and it launched and all was good, or so I thought. After about 4 days (after the full reinstallation), I got the same error in FFVII and Abzu, stating that DirectX needed to be installed. I thought it was a windows update issue, so I started trying to uninstall the latest windows updates and test the games, but no matter what I uninstalled, the same error occurred.

There was not much that I could find from research, most said to just reinstall directx or check for updates, both of which I had done (also it was a fresh windows install), but then I stumbled across this post ([SOLVED] Game keeps asking for DirectX, despite it having already been installed (also, error 0xc000007b) :: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Redux General Discussions) which was similar to what I was seeing, but for a different game. On their response on the 25th, they stated they found the issue was with XINPUT1_3.DLL, so I tried replacing that, same issue on both games. But that post then lead me to this one (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3193661871), which then fixed the issue! Essentially what you need to do is replace all of the files listed and overwrite when it asks if you want to overwrite files (you may want to save the original files in a separate location to restore if the overwrite doesnt work). I grabbed the files from my desktop computer and after pasting to my surface, was able to run UE4 games again.

TL;DR

If you are getting a DirectX required message (or a 0xc000007b Error) when trying to run UE4 games on surface, when you know DirectX is installed, you may need to replace/overwrite some .dll files (listed locations and files in the second link), to get the UE4 to start working again.