"... why do new games (and I mean within this year) still require DirectX 9?"
Because so many game devs are troglodytes? :)
As Chris posted, I think DX9 has been seen as the lowest common denominator. And the most that DX9 can ask of your device's graphics system is much less than the max using DX12. As Chris also wrote: "cheap video cards are cheap for a reason". I have a couple of cheaper Windows tablets, both running Intel Atom SOCs [System On Chip], using the CPU's built-in GPU [Graphics Processor]. That built-in GPU supports DX 12, but not all of it, at least in hardware, so the odds are greater that while those tablets can play DX9 casual games just fine, they'd have problems, or wouldn't be able to run at least some DX12 games at all. That would depend on what the game's dev, or the game engine asked of the GPU, but from dev posts I've read, it's easier to just use DX9 & not worry about it.
But there is hope... the Unity game development platform for example is dropping DX9 support this summer, because of problems like you experienced.
As far as the future goes, what the biggest companies are looking at is game streaming, e.g. Google's expected to dive in soon. The huge success -- and profits -- of Candy Crush sorta point the way. Rather then target specific platforms, e.g. Windows, Xbox, Playstation, Android etc., game devs would target the streaming platform that would ideally work on all of the above. Windows device sales have been declining for years, while sales of Android devices have plateaued, & are in some cases declining too. Microsoft is said to be *maybe* planning one more Xbox generation, while I haven't seen anything about Sony's Playstation. Instead of trying to pick winners & losers among all of today's platforms, streaming targets them all, plus might hopefully generate that regular subscription revenue companies like Microsoft drool over.
Complete, total, utter speculation... we **might** in the future, however many years from now, see fairly cheap, portable Windows devices running ARM processors, delivering what we're used to with today's Android devices, e.g. battery life, only using the Windows environment rather than Android. Qualcomm's developing chipsets designed for Windows devices to cure performance problems when using their existing cell phone chipset. Given current events, it's probably also a given that companies like Mediatek will have similar but cheaper products. While it could be abandoned -- may have been already -- Microsoft was developing a version of Windows without the legacy win32 code that makes Windows' footprint so relatively huge compared to Android. And while their Windows Store was anything but successful, Microsoft is still trying to salvage its good parts, e.g. sandboxing, while emphasizing Progressive Web Apps [PWAs] support, and figuring out new & better ways to get Windows code into the store, e.g. their upcoming software installation process that sorta works like the Cameyo app that Kryptellor favors, that makes apps portable. Something like that could probably also play streamed games, or maybe focus mainly on streaming games.
