A post to the RSI Community Forums explains a change in plans for Star Citizen. In response to a question on the topic, Cloud Imperium’s Alistair Brown explains they are now planning to support the Vulkan graphics API instead of DirectX 12 in their spaceflight game (thanks DSOGaming). Among other advantages, this will not require the use of Windows 10. He explains their reasoning in full here:

Years ago we stated our intention to support DX12, but since the introduction of Vulkan which has the same feature set and performance advantages this seemed a much more logical rendering API to use as it doesn't force our users to upgrade to Windows 10 and opens the door for a single graphics API that could be used on all Windows 7, 8, 10 & Linux. As a result our current intention is to only support Vulkan and eventually drop support for DX11 as this shouldn't effect any of our backers. DX12 would only be considered if we found it gave us a specific and substantial advantage over Vulkan. The API's really aren't that different though, 95% of the work for these APIs is to change the paradigm of the rendering pipeline, which is the same for both APIs.