Home Gaming Star Citizen will support DirectX 12…eventually

Star Citizen will support DirectX 12…eventually

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Star Citizen, the gloriously ambitious space sim with an ever-increasing scope and budget is an incredibly good looking game, thanks to its use of Crytek’s CryEngine. And it could end up looking (and importantly, running!) better – because it looks like the game will utilise DirectX 12.

That’s the plan, anyway.

Speaking to Gamers Nexus in a long, technical interview, Cloud Imperium’s Chris Roberts explained the plan to move support not just Direct X 12, but other low-level API’s like Vulkan.

“We’re in process. It’s part of one of the tasks of the engine group right now, so it’s actually something we’ve commenced on and are working on,” Roberts says.

“We’re doing it the right way, versus just changing a couple API calls and saying ‘we’ve got Dx12,’ so it won’t be ready until next year, but we’re actively working on it. We work pretty closely with AMD and it’s one of the things that is a big deal to them and would be a big deal for nVidia, too. We really want to try to utilize more of the power of today’s graphics cards, so it’s that, it’s also on the compute side where there’s a whole bunch of stuff that we’re starting to lay onto compute, allowing us to do pretty cool stuff, like voxels and stuff like that.”

Don’t expect any of these lower level API’s to be implemented any time soon though. In fact, they may not even be part of the game when it finally sees retail release some time in 2037.

“I think, fundamentally, there is some definite work that has to happen on the low-level in all game engines to really push Dx12. It’s not just adding more jobs, it’s also about refactoring some of the pipeline, how you deal with the data, how you organize your resources so you can be more parallel, which is how you get the real power of Dx12 or Vulkan.

You can take a Dx11 renderer and make it Dx12 pretty quickly. You’re not going to get the benefit of Dx12 or the Vulkan stuff until you do more fundamental refactoring. That’s what we’re doing – we’re saying, ‘we’re gonna do it right so that we’ll really get the performance gains.”

If you’re interested in the tech behind Star Citizen, and how the game is leveraging CryEngine give the article at GamerNexus a read.

Last Updated: October 1, 2015

10 Comments

  1. Ottokie "Yahtzee"

    October 1, 2015 at 17:28

    Is this when it releases… eventually? xD

    Reply

  2. Ghost In The Rift

    October 1, 2015 at 17:29

    2037 seems about right,well if Derek Smart stops with his sabotage missions it should release by 2028

    Reply

  3. Grand Admiral Chief

    October 2, 2015 at 07:02

    I actually forgot about this damn thing

    Reply

    • Ottokie "Yahtzee"

      October 2, 2015 at 08:18

      I keep forgetting that No man Sky exists every 3 months

      Reply

      • Graeme Willy

        February 8, 2016 at 06:58

        Me too, but No Man’s Sky is not a space sim. NMS is an exploration/ adventure game. Maybe our first ever exploration adventure simulator. You just fly a basic craft and take it to worlds to identify and document new species, explore ruins for ship diagrams and — err…swim. I imagine the flying will be more like a Rogue Squadron/ X-wing game. Not too crazy on the Newtonian side of things and most definitely no concerns over shield quadrants, power distribution etc. I’m only put off over the art design. At first, I found it neat. A seemingly 60’s retro sci-fi art theme, but as I watched footage of the game over the past year and a half, every single planet I’ve seen looks the same, with the same bizarre creatures…and don’t get me started over the wildlife preservation drones –oh…I shot a space goat…guess I better flee the planet for my life!” Seriously? Shooting a goat makes you public enemy number one in this world? How did they know I wasn’t going to eat that? What if I was hungry?

        Reply

  4. Brady miaau

    October 2, 2015 at 07:29

    To be fair, when they started development DX11 was a stretch goal.

    Reply

  5. HairyEwok

    October 2, 2015 at 07:41

    Star Citizen is a true eventually game…. Will release eventually, will run on DX12 eventually, will take all your money eventually……

    Reply

  6. Gdom

    October 2, 2015 at 16:10

    They are only about 3 years into production of the game. Let’s put this into context… Call Of Duty releases are developed for 3 years. It takes 3 years to make THE EXACT SAME GAME. Grand Theft Auto 5 took 5 years to produce, and they didn’t have to build up a studio from nothing, they’ve retained a lot of talent making very similar games on an updated engine. Star Citizen is being built on a completely revamped CryEngine from a team that was pulled from many different sources. It can’t be done overnight. So grats to all of the armchair developers.

    Reply

  7. freakofmeds

    October 23, 2015 at 17:37

    Why is everyone up in a bunch about their development cycle? They are proceeding just fine even if they release in 2017. They started development in 2011. The only reason it feels this long is because we actually knew about the very beginning of development at the time of the kickstarter campaign. A game of this immense magnitude should take about 5-6 years to develop.

    GTA games, like the latest GTA V, took even longer than that to develop, and they have an established team. You only hear about it about 3-4 years into development or 1-2 years before release.

    Take it easy, they are progressing very well and I certainly look forward to this game whenever it comes out. Even though they are saying 2016, I think 2017 to 2018 is more realistic.

    Reply

  8. Graeme Willy

    February 8, 2016 at 06:39

    Yeah my current low end build will benefit from DX12 in a big way. I’m only running an R7 370 and AMD A10-7870K, both of which are fully DX12.x compliant. So when asynchronous GPU finally becomes activated, I’ll have 586 extra stream processors helping out my build. It won’t help me to jump into the 4K realm, but I also don’t own any 4K devices, so whatever 😉 It will just be nice to have the extra FPS

    Reply

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