Is DirectX 12 really going to take over?

[Headfoot]

Look at it from the programming perspective. DX 11 provided an abstraction floor, but not an abstraction ceiling. This doesn't change for DX12, all it does is lower the abstraction floor. What that means is you don't need to be good at DX12 or low level programming to use DX12 - you just need to buy/use a commercially available framework that does.

Nobody programs blogs in C++ because its a colossal waste of time when you can get the whole thing done extremely quickly on WordPress. Same thing with low-skill level developers and yet-another-indie-platformer. Just get Unity and be done

You can for all practical purposes create DX11 on top of DX12. You can always abstract more.

 

[Rifter]

It will take over. In time

All the people saying smaller and indie developers wont be able to afford to learn how to use it must not be paying attention, cause most of those small developers are using premade engines such as unity to release their games and unity will for sure be getting DX12 soon.

 

[Madpacket]

Console development, engine and middleware tools dictate how the majority of games are created. Provided the software is available the games will come. Developers are smart and will use what's at their disposal. It's not a question of eventual adoption, it's already happening. The more important question is will Vulcan have a real chance of disrupting DX12 given the ever growing handheld gaming market. The portability of Vulcan may trump DX12, and this would be a good thing for everyone but Microsoft.

 

[Carfax83]

If MS allowed DX12 to win7, DX11 will die immediately.

DX12 will never come to Windows 7, because DX12 is tied into WDDM 2.x..

As for the topic, I don't think Microsoft intended DX12 to supplant DX11. DX12 is supposed to be used by elite developers that have much higher coding ability than the average developer. For average developers (from a technical standpoint), DX11.3 will suffice.

The learning curve seems to be very steep though, but the benefits can be tremendous. Nixxes just came out with another DX12 patch for Deus Ex Mankind Divided, and I can honestly say that now, the game runs noticeably better in DX12 than it does in DX11. You can just tell that the game is using the CPU, GPU and RAM much more effectively to produce higher and more consistent framerates and less frame time variance..

It took them awhile to get there, but it's well worth it I think..

 

[zinfamous]

It will take over when Nvidia says so.
I'm not trying to troll, but dead serious.
Reason? the market leader usually dictates new technology or software.
Pc games that is.

For the near future we will get half ass direct X 12 games that sometimes use some elements of direct x 12 but are built with direct x 11 in mind.

We have seen this before guys.

AAA PC games are pretty much console ports now. So PC really doesn't dictate anything.

 

[Yakk]

Yup, consoles get the AAA treatment because they being in the money.

PC's are a distant second in that area, especially for big studio executives.

 

[happy medium]

AAA PC games are pretty much console ports now. So PC really doesn't dictate anything.

still waiting for a console with a keyboard and mouse. I doubt there would be pc gaming if it happened.

 

[Bacon1]

still waiting for a console with a keyboard and mouse. I doubt there would be pc gaming if it happened.

Enjoy your new xbox: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/microsoft-xbox-one-mouse-and-keyboard-support-is-months-away/

 

[zinfamous]

still waiting for a console with a keyboard and mouse. I doubt there would be pc gaming if it happened.

This doesn't really add anything to your earlier argument. Besides the fact that this actually has been a thing with consoles since at least the PS3, KB&M availability really has nothing to do with the fact that consoles dominate the gaming industry, that AAA games (the ones that actually determine GPU sales and performance needs) are now developed for consoles first and ported to PC, and that user preference of a now niche sector of the market isn't that compelling when targeting your products.

 

[Carfax83]

Guys, it's more complicated than simply Consoles > PC when it comes to development. It would be more accurate to state that the lowest common denominator dictates development.. Take for example Dragon Age Inquisition. This game was released on PS3, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS4 and PC. Due to last gen console limitations, PC AND current gen consoles both had graphics and gameplay affected in a negative manner as a result. So it doesn't matter what the platforms are, the weakest one (which is always a console) is going to dictate development to a large degree.

Also, when it comes to assets, most game developers actually develop for PC first, and then downgrade appropriately for the consoles. They do this because it's easier to downgrade assets than to upgrade them. And last but not least, PC gaming is the most lucrative platform to develop for, even if the overall sales are less than what it is for consoles. There is a reason why more and more developers (not less) are targeting the PC platform for their games..

 

[SPBHM]

Enjoy your new xbox: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/microsoft-xbox-one-mouse-and-keyboard-support-is-months-away/

this might be a good thing, because with all the "play anywhere stuff" there is a reason for the games to actually support it

but, even the Playstation 2 supported USB KB and mouse (the dreamcast had proprietary KB and mouse, even the PS1 and Super Nes had a few games with a mouse support), but very few games supported, same for the PS3...
so yes, the console supporting doesn't mean much when the games don't.

 

[Red Hawk]

Guys, it's more complicated than simply Consoles > PC when it comes to development. It would be more accurate to state that the lowest common denominator dictates development.. Take for example Dragon Age Inquisition. This game was released on PS3, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS4 and PC. Due to last gen console limitations, PC AND current gen consoles both had graphics and gameplay affected in a negative manner as a result. So it doesn't matter what the platforms are, the weakest one (which is always a console) is going to dictate development to a large degree.

Also, when it comes to assets, most game developers actually develop for PC first, and then downgrade appropriately for the consoles. They do this because it's easier to downgrade assets than to upgrade them. And last but not least, PC gaming is the most lucrative platform to develop for, even if the overall sales are less than what it is for consoles. There is a reason why more and more developers (not less) are targeting the PC platform for their games..

Man, I'm still salty about what happened with Dragon Age Inquisition. They showed off all these cool persistent world features, where you were making decisions in real time and having them play out in the area you were in. You could choose to have your soldiers hold a fortress or go save a village, at the cost of one or the other, and then it would happen. You could go set fire to enemy ships along the shore line, and it would affect the course of events in quests. That's a pretty awesome feature to have!

Then the actual game came out, and it wasn't in the game. In a later interview, the game's director explained that the features were cut because they couldn't get them to run on last gen consoles. And for what? The game was borderline broken on last-gen consoles, and BioWare ended up abandoning support for those consoles through patches and DLC anyways. So we ended up with effectively a prettied-up last gen game that last gen players couldn't even fully experience. I think the lack of DLC support is a sign that the developers really did want to break away from last gen consoles, but the executives at EA didn't want to yet, so the developers had no choice. Dragon Age Inquisition was a pretty great game I thought, but it could have been even better. We could have had it alllllllll...I just hope that Mass Effect Andromeda sees some of the ideas they had for DAI come to fruition.

 

[Carfax83]

^^ Indeed. You can see the hilarity of Dragon Age Inquisition on Xbox 360 and PS3 in this video:

Check the combat section at 4:45 for some massive framerate drops. This is even after some very significant visual downgrades..

But it goes back to what I've been saying. As game technology advances, older hardware can often be left behind in the dust...

But despite the atrocious performance of DAI on last gen hardware, I guess I can see why Bioware included them. Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age 2 were both released on Xbox 360 and PS3, so it would have looked weird if the third installment was missing..

 

[Spjut]

Perhaps I'm just forgiving, but the last-gen versions of DA:I don't seem that bad considering how old and weak the hardware is. Might have stuck to 30 FPS if they had toned down the visuals a bit further.The 360's GPU was said to be comparable to the X1900, wasn't it? Though it had some features that PC GPUs didn't support until the HD 2000 series. And back in 2009, Capcom compared the CPU to a dual core Pentium 4 at 3.2 ghz.
Consider that the official PC minimum requirement for that game is either an 8800GT or HD 4870 and quad core CPU

 

[dogen1]

I don't think we'll know until a few years from now, but I don't think DX12 and Vulkan will entirely take over. The extra work required just won't be worth it for every game. I know lots of indies use unity and unreal, but some of them still make custom engines and they'll stick with ogl and dx11 as long as they're sufficient.

 

[TheELF]

I don't think there is much extra work involved unless you want to do very GPU specific things,it's just a guess of mine but I'm basing that on what dota2 did with vulkan,if you look at it Dx11 has a ~15% CPU overhead which means they didn't really bothered with optimizations for the GPU in dx11,so I'm guessing the same is true for vulkan,no special optimizations just the basic breaking up of the monolithic driver and it results in good gains.

 

[dogen1]

I don't think there is much extra work involved unless you want to do very GPU specific things,it's just a guess of mine but I'm basing that on what dota2 did with vulkan,if you look at it Dx11 has a ~15% CPU overhead which means they didn't really bothered with optimizations for the GPU in dx11,so I'm guessing the same is true for vulkan,no special optimizations just the basic breaking up of the monolithic driver and it results in good gains.

You have to handle resource management manually. Not worth the effort if you don't need the extra performance.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Unity, etc. will support DX12 but it's very unlikely that they will require it any time soon.

Unity in particular caters to low-spec indie games and throwing away 77% of your potential market to only support Windows 10 would be insane.

As Windows 10 improves and more people move to it then dropping DX11 starts to make sense but that will take years.

 

[ConsoleLover]

DX12 wasn't meant to replace DX11, but offer a choice for highly skilled engine developers who want to control everything happening in graphics.
I'm quite sure that high level APIs are still needed in future, what is the name they will be called is not known.

Agreed that results from Vulkan and DX12 will get a lot better as they mature and developers can write software properly for them.

DX12 has a sort of "default" code, in a manner of speaking that will allow low resource developers to develop in DX12 and use the benefits, but on a bit higher level, as they could in DX11. I remember specifically the DX12 guy at MS specifically talking about this. I don't know if its implemented yet, it was something he said they were working on and would introduce later on. It obviously won't be the same as DX11, but it will improve things for smaller developers.

So essentially DX12 will/has a more basic code level. Vulkan though seems even better than DX12, I could see Linux taking over if a serious company was to make an OS or essentially get the rights to some of the better ones, make it Vulkan centric, and use its status to push the OS and kill Microsoft.

 

[zinfamous]

I thought that DX12 is supposed to be the final DX, no? I think that whenever Win10 adoption dominates a year or two from now, there will be few other DX options, which I assume leaves Vulcan or other APIs as the future route of development in this realm?

 

[BFG10K]

It will take over when Nvidia says so.
I'm not trying to troll, but dead serious.
Reason? the market leader usually dictates new technology or software.
Pc games that is.

You mean like hardware PhysX, 3DVision and G-Sync? Yeah, those really "took over".

As for DX12, it'll continue to be a drop in the bucket compared to DX11.

 

[ultimatebob]

I hope not. I missed my opportunity to get the free Windows 10 upgrade on my Windows 7 gaming box.

 

[Phynaz]

^ You can still get Windows 10 for free.

 

[Red Hawk]

You mean like hardware PhysX, 3DVision and G-Sync? Yeah, those really "took over".

As for DX12, it'll continue to be a drop in the bucket compared to DX11.

Difference here being that DirectX 12 has support from all three vendors. What held PhysX, etc. , back doesn't really apply to DX12.

DX12 will be a drop in the bucket until, you know, it isn't. In a few years I'm sure all the flashy AAA games that people buy shiny new graphics cards to begin with will support either DX12 or Vulkan.

 

[Redentor]

Dx12 multi GPUs scaling seems pretty good: http://www.bitsandchips.it/8-gaming...-per-deus-ex-mankind-divided-le-radeon-volano