Cloud Imperium Games Will Use Vulkan For 'Star Citizen,' Not Supporting DirectX 12

[heirdeux]

Cloud Imperium Games wants the game to use one single API without forcing users to upgrade their OS for the sake of performance.

Cloud Imperium Games Will Use Vulkan For 'Star Citizen,' Not Supporting DirectX 12 : Read more

 

[garrett040]

good, screw micro**** and their proprietary dx12

Language edit by moderator. This is a family friendly website.

 

[Longscope]

Since StarEngine (cig's version of cryengine) and lumberyard are both based off of the same cryengine branch, seems like a good use of lumberyard's networking ability.

As far as Vulkan... it worked great on DooM, should work good for SC.

 

[sesam]

All major developers should shift to Vulkan. Unless Microsoft hands you a bag of money it does not make any sense to support DX12. Vulkan has similar or better performance and multi OS/platform support.

 

[CRO5513Y]

I agree with this, i hope they fix performance soon as well i totally love flying around the universe in 30 FPS despite 10% GPU load and CPU on 60-70% most the time (highest any game has ever pushed it) and RAM at 7-9GB which is lovely... The game does look good tho and i couldn't agree more with them changing from DirectX 11 to Vulkan.

*Edit* my mate running 2x GTX 1080 and a i7-5820K also runs the same and couldn't agree more.

 

[alextheblue]

All major developers should shift to Vulkan. Unless Microsoft hands you a bag of money it does not make any sense to support DX12. Vulkan has similar or better performance and multi OS/platform support.

Developers are motivated by more than just bags of money, amazingly. They have to worry about things like time to market and overall development costs. If someone paid you $5000 to use Whizbang Graphics API (here, take this bag of money with strings attached), but doing so incurred an additional $10K in development costs and delayed your product two months, it doesn't make sense to do so. One of the big reasons high-level DX was more popular with developers vs high level OGL: It was easier to develop with. I can't say that is true with Vulkan vs DX12 but the possibility exists.

So IF there's a similar (but likely smaller) advantage with the low-level DX12, there's incentive to use it and it will remain popular with many developers. I wouldn't blame them. That being said I really don't care what engine Star Citizen uses or what API. DX, OGL, Vulkan - Glide even! Cryengine, id Tech, Source, Unreal, Unity... Build perhaps. Just please make it out of alpha soon... and out of beta before 2020.

 

[alextheblue]

As far as Vulkan... it worked great on DooM, should work good for SC.

It's just an API. What they do with it is what counts. id is generally pretty good at optimizing... CIG... we'll see. I won't hold alpha performance against them, but you can't extrapolate performance from Doom just because they're using the same API. Especially when talking about a low-level API like Vulkan or DX12.

 

[kinggremlin]

All major developers should shift to Vulkan. Unless Microsoft hands you a bag of money it does not make any sense to support DX12. Vulkan has similar or better performance and multi OS/platform support.

Vulkan is about a year behind DX12 feature wise, and MS continues to add features with updates. As is usually the case, when MS is motivated, they "oddly" increase their rate of development and quality. As older Windows OS's are phased out, and 10 and whatever else is coming become the standard, Vulkan will turn into the next OpenGL. Also, some of Vulkan's comparable features to DX12 also require Windows 10, since the features require WDDM 2.0 to work.

According to Steam, about 0.79% of gamers are using Linux. Somehow, I doubt Cloud Imperium is using Vulkan so they can target that market. Microsoft OS's own the gaming market, so acting like you using Vulkan is somehow breaking free from the MS prison is missing the forest for the trees. The platform support benefits of Vulkan vs DX12 right now is that Vulkan supports older versions of Windows, though again not with all features, which is still tying you into Microsoft. But whatever helps you sleep at night.

 

[mrmez]

W10 has 25% market share while W7 has almost 50%

Surprised anyone is using DX12 since Vulcan will triple your potential customers.

 

[jasonkaler]

"as it doesn't force our users to upgrade to Windows 10 "

That's the last of their concerns. By the time star citizen is finally released, we'll all be on windows 14.

 

[mitch074]

Vulkan is also supported on Nintendo Switch and is officially the default API under the newer versions of Android; OpenGL is kept around for compatibility, but there are talks about reimplementing it over Vulkan (making it so that chip makers only have to provide Vulkan drivers for OpenGL to work on their chip). It is also proven that current consoles can run Vulkan (tested true with a PS4 running Linux, the proprietary AMD graphics driver and the Vulkan-using Dolphin emulator - it's funny to see Wind Waker running on a Sony machine!)
While support for older versions of Windows does mean that it will have meaning only for people that wanted to keep their Win7 until 2019 (not that far), it also covers those that want to keep Win8/8.1 until 2021 - that is, not too many, but still a few. I'm happy about Linux support though, as most of my games have a Linux version and I don't have to reboot from my normal browsing/work/mail/video session to boot Win10.

 

[ClowReed]

CIG always improving. Nice to hear the good news! Seems very rational to me.

 

[Rob_54]

W10 has 25% market share while W7 has almost 50%

Surprised anyone is using DX12 since Vulcan will triple your potential customers.

You think all those corporate laptop users on Win7 are potential customers? I think not. Look at the Steam Hardware Survey for a more accurate indication as to what potential customers are using. 47.71% on Win10 as of Feb 2017.

 

[falchard]

No one should support Vulkan. It shows AMD in an incredibly good light. What will nVidia be without their gimpware? They would be losing in every price category unless they payoff devs to make sure AMD cards don't work on their games.

 

[computerguy72]

Microsoft should have put out a version of DX12 that is much easier to get performance benefits out of. To date only very low end equipment benefits where mid to high get basically nothing. They should just rebrand DX12 to something else and re-release with some major benefits to stay competitive or Vulkan will crush them.

 

[mitch074]

Microsoft should have put out a version of DX12 that is much easier to get performance benefits out of. To date only very low end equipment benefits where mid to high get basically nothing. They should just rebrand DX12 to something else and re-release with some major benefits to stay competitive or Vulkan will crush them.

You don't understand what you're talking about - DX12 games (and Vulkan ones too) will get massive performance boosts at all levels once engines are properly making use of the API; current games' use of DX12/Vulkan alleviates CPU bottlenecks (thus why it looks like cheap CPUs get a boost out of it), and since it's stupid to pair a powerful GPU with a cheap CPU it looks like the benefit only goes to cheap machines - it doesn't. Under Vulkan, Doom gets a similar boost at all performance tiers: my RX480 (mid-high range) gets almost as much of a boost as a Fury X (which is high-range) or a RX460 (which is entry level) when using Vulkan instead of OpenGL (which is pretty much equivalent to DX11).

Thing is, most current DX12 games are actually "DX11 with croutons"; only the next generation of graphics engines will really make use of DX12/Vulkan features as optimizations for DX11 actually get in the way of really making use of these API's advantages.