Challenge leagues are a great opportunity for a fresh start in a new economy. All of your old characters and items are still present in the Standard and Hardcore leagues, but you're encouraged to join the new leagues, complete challenges and demonstrate your mastery of Path of Exile! Path of Exile no longer supports the Windows XP or Windows Vista operating systems. It will still support a 32-bit client for users of 32-bit versions of Windows, but we strongly encourage users to use the 64-bit client if they can. With no more support for Windows XP and Vista, we are also finally retiring support for the DirectX 9 rendering mode, as DirectX 11 is fully supported in recent versions of Windows and is so much faster. By not having to maintain support for two versions of DirectX, we are able to simplify a lot of code, making it faster.