Over the weekend, Cloud Imperium fielded questions from players on some of the more technical elements on display in Star Citizen’s last Around the Verse. Turns out that some major DirectX changes are on the horizon.
“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,” explains Director of Graphics Engineering Ali Brown. “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.”
Brown also addresses a complaint that “CIG is avoiding the most important questions” and says that the game’s “dedicated systems for asteroids & debris we can already handle over 100,000 individually moving objects on screen at well over 60fps” bolstered by “an imposter system to handle the visualization of millions more in the background.”
