Hey, remember that Gen 12 renderer and Vulkan backend tech that Star Citizen made a lot of noise about during last year’s CitizenCon? Well it’s already in the game as of alpha 3.16. Sort of. At least that’s according to Director of Graphics Engineering Ali Brown, who was the guest for this past Friday’s Star Citizen Live broadcast.
Brown confirmed that parts of the Gen 12 renderer were already in-game as of the latest patch, but fully swapping over to the renderer and moving to Vulkan will have to be done piece by piece as legacy systems like DirectX will need to be switched incrementally. Brown further noted that those with “legacy hardware” won’t be able to take advantage of many of Gen 12’s benefits, leaving those players with no performance improvements. This isn’t to say that older hardware support will be fully dropped, but ultimately cores are king and the game will exploit whatever CPU power players can provide.
The video also talked further about Lumberyard versus UE5, other feature support like HDR, and adding more environment effects like dust and snow among other things. The complete hour-long broadcast is available below.
