Can we expect DX11 features in the future? What is the future of the graphics engine?

[Heliocon]

The title pretty much says it all, I started a similar thread a month ago but got no real feedback (but I also misspelled the title lol).

Pretty much everyone is capable of running it now. In fact very few new games being released to PC do not feature DX11 these days, so BOS is the odd one out given how much visual fidelity matters to the experience. I do realize we are using ROF's engine, but it is getting old in the tooth and cant be optimized anymore, its DX9 for Christ sake. DX9 is from the era of Windows XP which is no longer even supported by Microsoft.

So why switch to DX11?

Greatly enhanced pipeline for textures and lighting etc. This means the game utilizes these features more efficiently, they are easier to code for and they have greatly enhanced fidelity.

Tesselation which would solve issues of buildings/terrain/plane detail at a distance so that changes to geometry are phased in, rather then just switching at a pre determined distance as we all know they do (looking into the distance you can see a line where all the textures past it are blurry).

The upgrade would also most likely eliminate the problem of custom plane skins not showing at a distance (they only re-skin when you get close, thus camouflage (say having a white plane) does not help at all except at close range). It would also eliminate the need to switch textures in and out of memory when you are looking/not looking at a plane, as nothing is worse than looking at someone next to you on the runway and all of a sudden their plane skin changing from default to custom.

 

These are just some of the ideas of the top of my head, if you want a good well thought out argument of why the engine should use DX11 features I encourage you to look at my posts on the CLOD forums where I was a big proponent of DX11 and had many good debates about its merits. Unfortunately the developers chose not to use DX11 there and I strongly believe it is one of the reasons the game was a commercial failure from a technical standpoint as they tried to do too much with the limited resources of DX9/10 leading to poor performance and I am sure high cost of developing the now effectively scraped and outdated graphics engine.

[IIN8II]

I feel like I remember the Devs addressing this some time ago, but I cannot locate the post. Perhaps someone else can find it.

[LLv34_Flanker]

S!

 

 DirectX 12 seems to be way better than 11 with it's direct hardware control and all that, creating less driver overhead than current versions do. AMD's Mantle is similar than upcoming 12, even though I suspect 12 will be in ways better with support for all brands. But yes, would be nice if BoS, or shall we say DN engine, would go towards newer DirectX and 64-bit.

[LLv34_Flanker]

S!

 

 I noticed the difference in MechWarrior Online, my performance leaped to the better when switching to DirectX 11

[von_Tom]

 

I believe one of the early Q&A sessions mentioned that DX11 would be looked at if the project is a success. Diary 1 from LOFT says DX9 is enough, so I guess it's a case of wait and see.

 

Hood

[Heliocon]

Whilst utilising some DX11 features would clearly improve some things, it's amazing how often this topic is brought up by people that don't really understand what the DX11 features really bring to the table.

 

 

 

Tesselaton has nothing to do with textures, it is related to geometry (3d shapes made up of polygons).

 

A key advantage of tessellation for realtime graphics is that it allows detail to be dynamically added and subtracted from a 3D mesh and its silhouette edges based on control parameters (often camera distance).

This whole topic is a red herring really.

 

There are numerous games that offer DirectX 11 rendering and also allow you to switch to DirectX 9 rendering as an option.

Most users would be hard pushed to notice the difference between the two.

 

If you actually read what I wrote you would see that I specifically said "so that changes to geometry are phased in". So before you go about accusing people of not knowing there stuff I suggest you pay more attention to what is actually in the sentence. Yes textures are mentioned at the end of the sentence because I believe the textures are swapped at the same time as the geometry is created. Also fyi while I currently don't model I used to use Maya quite a bit and am proficient in it (tessellation removes a lot of the workload of modeling details), I don't know much about you but I doubt that you can say the same.

 

As for DX12 its taken years for DX11 to catch on, and it will take years for DX12 to be used in development, not to mention hardware wise it may not be supported by currently available hardware and operating systems (I believe windows 10 will support it, but I am not sure if the current 900 range from NVidia will support DX12 for example). It also takes awhile for developers to familiarize themselves with the tech.

Also the reason why many games don't have a huge difference between DX9 and DX11 is that most pc games are also made for consoles, consoles that until this current gen couldn't use DX11 let alone even half decent resolution/AA. For this reason the return on investment for adding DX11 features for console ports is very low, resulting in poor examples/contrasts between the two. A better example of the capabilities of DX11 vs DX9 can be seen when comparing benchmarks for computers that fully utilize the DX11 feature set for geometry and lighting, there is a very distinct difference between the two.

Edited October 18, 2014 by Heliocon

[69th_chuter]

What I took away from the question of DX9 versus 11 when the  devs answered it was that they are fluent in DX9 with DX11 being a new language to them and they believed they could get the results they wanted with 9.  The old "stick to what you know" concept. 

 

------>  Again, that was my reading of the "between the lines".

 

 

 

PS   I also think if you're going to redo it now it would be better to go to 12, but then that would mean learning that ...

Edited October 18, 2014 by chuter

[Static]

www.junkship.net/News/2012/11/04/porting-to-directx-11-a-code-odyssey

 

DX12? 10 or 11 would be great for AMD/ATI GPU users since AMD stopped supporting a 12 year old API in their driver builds. How about Mantle? Maybe custom graphic settings added back into the game? So people can actually get the best perf out of their GPUs with this title.

 

DX12, that would be a bad idea because older even 1 yr old GPUs will not support the DX12 API at a hardware level and only or maybe at a driver level. Unless 1C/777 sent us all 970s or 980s for Xmas.

Edited October 19, 2014 by Static

[Livai]

DX11/12 features are marketing purposes. Because you can do even with DX9 really epic graphic like the Game "Vanishing of Ethan Carter" show!

 

"Photogrammetry"  allows highly realistic assets that would be impossible to make by hand

[Static]

AMD & Nvidia prep for next gen DX12

 

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/amd-and-nvidia-prep-for-next-gen-directx-12.html?noredirect=1#noredirect

Edited March 26, 2015 by Static

[damhan]

I bought this game 2 days ago. Running sli 970's on a liquid cooled i7 at 4.2ghz. I couldn't believe the poor performance, feel like I wasted my money. Reminds me of Il2 COD all over again. The textures are blurry and lack crisp definition. I play DCS at 3k at 60fps. This direct x 9 is a complete joke.

[SharpeXB]

I bought this game 2 days ago. Running sli 970's on a liquid cooled i7 at 4.2ghz. I couldn't believe the poor performance, feel like I wasted my money. Reminds me of Il2 COD all over again. The textures are blurry and lack crisp definition. I play DCS at 3k at 60fps. This direct x 9 is a complete joke.

Something is wrong. With a system like that it should run very well. What i7 are you using?

[ShamrockOneFive]

I bought this game 2 days ago. Running sli 970's on a liquid cooled i7 at 4.2ghz. I couldn't believe the poor performance, feel like I wasted my money. Reminds me of Il2 COD all over again. The textures are blurry and lack crisp definition. I play DCS at 3k at 60fps. This direct x 9 is a complete joke.

 

DCS in its current engine iteration still uses DirectX9 as well. Many game engines do. Only the most recent and really cutting edge stuff is using DX10 or 11 and I suspect quite a few will make the jump straight to DX12 once its released given its wide hardware compatibility and the improvements in performance.

 

AMD says it will take Mantle in a different direction but I think they have already made their point that "closer to the metal" API is required for modern graphics cards and Microsoft is responding.

[Porkman]

I bought this game 2 days ago. Running sli 970's on a liquid cooled i7 at 4.2ghz. I couldn't believe the poor performance, feel like I wasted my money. Reminds me of Il2 COD all over again. The textures are blurry and lack crisp definition. I play DCS at 3k at 60fps. This direct x 9 is a complete joke.

Make sure you do not have any overlays running (steam/teamspeak, etc). It seems BOS reacts very negatively to overlays and seriously degrades graphics. Check out the thread in tech issues with the title about cloud and smoke rendering for more info.

Edited March 26, 2015 by Porkman

[reve_etrange]

I bought this game 2 days ago. Running sli 970's on a liquid cooled i7 at 4.2ghz. I couldn't believe the poor performance, feel like I wasted my money. Reminds me of Il2 COD all over again. The textures are blurry and lack crisp definition. I play DCS at 3k at 60fps. This direct x 9 is a complete joke.

 

Have you changed settings in the Nvidia drivers? If the game is on 'full screen' and you pick 'override game settings' you can increase the AA.

[II/JG17_HerrMurf]

I am much more interested, after reading several (admittedly superficial) articles on the benefits of DX 12 down the road. The developers never said they didn't understand DX 11 but that the engine was written for DX9 and there was no appreciable performance advantage to rewriting the game code in it (DX11). This conversation happened pretty early in the development cycle.

 

DX 12, with a potential 20-50% graphics gain, however, could be worth it in a couple of years time. I think the game will have enough longevity to possibly pursue DX 12. DX 11 is, likely, not going to happen.

 

Since I am a Neophyte, would the graphics gain = an (significantly) increased ground and aircraft count within the game? I think the answer is yes but I'm more of a flyer than one who understands code.

[AbortedMan]

"Hurr durr maek BoS gaem dx12 because it goes 1 louder than dx9 hodor."

 

These devs should stop wasting their time making new content and start pressing the "Add dx12" button, amirite OP?

Edited March 26, 2015 by AbortedMan

[Zettman]

S!

 

DX12 with the option to stack VRAM in SLI, meaning that three 3 GB VRAM cards will no longer have 3 GB VRAM in SLI but 9 GB (minus that what is used to keep them in sync) sounds awesome. If this feature is supported by Fermi and Kepler, that would be really great for a lot of SLI/Crossfire users!

 

Well to be honest BoS doesn't need that  much VRAM, if I'm using a moderate DSR I can still play with my 3 GB VRAM. But lowering the CPU load would be great!

 

Zettman

[312_Tygr]

DX12 does look interesting - the support will be there in HW (for AMD - HD7000 series and above, for nVidia 400 series and above). I don't see a reason why not to move there - except for the lack of support in Windoze 8.1 and lower (but you can keep the old engine for those).

[SR-F_Winger]

The drop of support of DX9 titles for Oculus rift is another BIG reason to invest into a DX12 upgrade.

IMO IF the upgrade is done it should be done right and to DX12 and not 11.

[Sim]

Some interesting news. DX12 can push 16x more draw calls and scales up to 6 CPU cores:

 

http://techreport.com/news/28026/amd-shows-off-directx-12-performance-with-new-3dmark-benchmark

 

Really looking forward to see how this will translate into real-world performance gains. If anyone at 1CGS is working silently on an engine upgrade - please consider going straight for DirectX 12 feature set.

[Livai]

To be realistic the improvement will be just 10-30 FPS more. Sometimes it will peak to higher FPS like 10-80 FPS more if we are lucky. War Thunder is not a good example to see the changes from DirectX 9 to DirectX 11 but good for a example what more FPS we can expect.

 

8. You cannot use the forum for advertising other products. Sending advertising materials through personal messages and placing advertising materials in signatures, profiles and avatars except personally agreed to by 1C-777 Limited is prohibited. All such incidents will be deleted without warning. Discussion of other games is only allowed in designated sections of the forum and will be stopped if the discussion becomes an advertising vehicle.

 

I think we will see improvements to the graphics engine not now but step by step. A very good example the major improvement from 32-bit to 64-bit. DirectX 12 can be very painful where you can run easy into memory management problems and even more painful to avoid the buffer overflow under DirectX 12. Thats why I see DirectX 11 a more realistc graphics engine update, maybe someday.................

[69th_chuter]

 ... or ... DX12 could be an advantage for another reason ...

 

 

www.extremetech.com/gaming/219358-why-ai-still-sucks-in-video-games-and-how-directx-12-could-change-it-for-the-better

[No601_Swallow]

I honestly don't know what I'm talking about, but spurred by the resurrection of this thread I googled and...

 

 

 

Unlike during the 90s or early 00s, it’s very rare these days for any game to be based on a one-shot engine built directly on top of a given graphics APIs. Many large publishers have their own in-house engine teams dedicated purely to keeping their technology up to date, and even independent developers have plenty of high-quality, professionally maintained engines to choose from. As such, the increased programming complexity of low-level APIs will in many cases be absorbed by middleware developers—who have the resources and expertise to deal with these challenges—rather than hitting game developers directly.

 

This is from an interesting article from here. 

 

Maybe this is the thing. BoS's (and every other flightsim's) engine has to be, I assume, bespoke - tailor-made (because of the pretty much unique requirements of a flightsim. For one thing, of course, at any one time you can see for miles and miles and miles.... and hence, the enormous visability bubble, the importance of LODs, etc, etc, etc...). BoS's (RoF's) engine is - I'm assuming - precisely a "one-shot engine", simply because of the genre, so for the devs to swap DX-thingies and high-level/low-level-whatsits is a big deal. They can't just licence the "Unreal Engine 735.5" or whateva...! 

 

I'm assuming it's a Big Thing for them to switch over. Anyway. it's a good article, which makes you think, "Thank the Sweet Lord Above that I'm not a game designer!"

Edited May 6, 2016 by No601_Swallow

[ShamrockOneFive]

I honestly don't know what I'm talking about, but spurred by the resurrection of this thread I googled and...

 

 

This is from an interesting article from here. 

 

Maybe this is the thing. BoS's (and every other flightsim's) engine has to be, I assume, bespoke - tailor-made (because of the pretty much unique requirements of a flightsim. For one thing, of course, at any one time you can see for miles and miles and miles.... and hence, the enormous visability bubble, the importance of LODs, etc, etc, etc...). BoS's (RoF's) engine is - I'm assuming - precisely a "one-shot engine", simply because of the genre, so for the devs to swap DX-thingies and high-level/low-level-whatsits is a big deal. They can't just licence the "Unreal Engine 735.5" or whateva...! 

 

I'm assuming it's a Big Thing for them to switch over. Anyway. it's a good article, which makes you think, "Thank the Sweet Lord Above that I'm not a game designer!"

 

Yep that's definitely the case. If they up Digital Nature from its current DX9 iteration to something new... It'll be essentially re-writing the graphics engine. I think the results would be worthwhile but its also a large job for a small team. If you look at the Unreal Engine team... well that's what they do and then license it all out. Or a company like DICE with EA's resources and they have an entire department devoted to keeping something like the Frostbite engine up to date.

 

Compared to IL-2 1946 which is a 15 year+ old engine... BoS looks positively modern. But what the latest engines can do is pushing things another level.

[NooneYouKnow]

If they do upgrade the engine I would rather them use Vulkan instead of DX12. Why limit it to the win10 only customer base? Vulkan runs on Win7/8/10, Linux and Mac and is comparable to DX12 as far as features go. Devs want more customers? There you go. F*ck DX12.

[SharpeXB]

Linux and Mac and is comparable to DX12 as far as features go. Devs want more customers? There you go.

Only 1% and 3% of gamers run Linux and OSX respectively. So it's pretty much a waste of time catering to that market. Plus Mac users can just run W via bootcamp. So there will never be a reason to be compatible with Macs

Edited May 7, 2016 by SharpeXB

[ShamrockOneFive]

If they do upgrade the engine I would rather them use Vulkan instead of DX12. Why limit it to the win10 only customer base? Vulkan runs on Win7/8/10, Linux and Mac and is comparable to DX12 as far as features go. Devs want more customers? There you go. F*ck DX12.

 

Yeah but I worry that Vulkan won't exist in a couple of years. Yes they got all of the stuff that Mantle was from AMD but its run by the guys who are working on OpenGL and that's been... less well developed these last few years.

 

DX12 seems inevitable. And also the improved performance and features are being put to good use by some developers already.

[NooneYouKnow]

Only 1% and 3% of gamers run Linux and OSX respectively. So it's pretty much a waste of time catering to that market. Plus Mac users can just run W via bootcamp. So there will never be a reason to be compatible with Macs

 

 Yes, but a majority of people don't run win 10, and many have no intention of ever running Win10.

[Dakpilot]

A lot of people also refused to move from Win XP...they had to eventually, DX12 is the future like it or not

 

If you want to live a Windows free life you will be in a very, very small minority, right or wrong for whatever reasons this is a fact

 

Cheers Dakpilot

[Scarecrow]

The graphics are fine. You kids nowadays don't even know what bad graphics are!

I grew up with a ZX Spectrum 48K, most games were in 2 colours!  They could display like 3 polygons.

We didn't have HDR and VR, you know what we had?

We had the front of the box the game came in cos that's what you had to pretend you were looking at in game. Oh yeah and games came in boxes with manuals. Those were the good old days!

We don't need better graphics, we need a program to convert a barbie and playboy magazines into Kelly LeBrock (this was hot in the eighties children).

 

I'm not keen on Windows 10 either unless it can turn a barbie and playboy in Kelly LeBrock.

[ShamrockOneFive]

The graphics are fine. You kids nowadays don't even know what bad graphics are!

I grew up with a ZX Spectrum 48K, most games were in 2 colours!  They could display like 3 polygons.

We didn't have HDR and VR, you know what we had?

We had the front of the box the game came in cos that's what you had to pretend you were looking at in game. Oh yeah and games came in boxes with manuals. Those were the good old days!

We don't need better graphics, we need a program to convert a barbie and playboy magazines into Kelly LeBrock (this was hot in the eighties children).

 

I'm not keen on Windows 10 either unless it can turn a barbie and playboy in Kelly LeBrock.

 

With that attitude we should just stick with 3 polygons for Bf109s and a slightly different shaped 3 polygon for the Yak-1. We don't NEED more

[BeastyBaiter]

DX12 is required moving forwards. I've been with this series since the original IL2 was released, but I'm not sure I'll stick around much longer if a shift to DX11 or 12 isn't made. DX9 is deader than dead and has been since Windows 7. As for the majority of PC's not using windows 10, that's true, but it has the largest share and the majority of those not running 10 are not gaming machines, they are business machines and granny's laptop she plays solitaire on. And it will take years for the graphics engine to be updated to the new standard. By the time that happens, anything below Win10 will be extremely rare on a gaming machine. There will be those who refuse to update, but they can't be catered to at the expense of the rest of us. Just as the 2-3 people playing BoS on 32bit machines were left behind recently, so too is the fate of those clinging to Win XP/7/8. The sooner BoS makes the change, the better. The risk of losing sales from not updating far outweighs the losses from leaving a few people behind who refuse to do a free update

[SharpeXB]

Yes, but a majority of people don't run win 10, and many have no intention of ever running Win10.

Not true. The highest % of gamers are already running Windows 10. Results from Steam H&S Survey

Edited May 8, 2016 by SharpeXB

[BeastyBaiter]

Both statements are true, Win 10 is the most common OS and also still not the majority. It will be the majority within 2 years though, which is the absolute earliest we could possibly expect a new graphics engine.

[216th_Jordan]

I'd sureley hope they fo for DX12 instead of DX11. What would be arguments for DX11 and against DX12?

[BeastyBaiter]

DX11 pros:

1) Win 7/8 compatibility (not relevant in 2+ years)

 

DX11 cons:

1) Inferior performance on ordinary monitors

2) Poor driver support in 2+ years (since it will be a rarity)

3) Unlikely to get support in 2-3 years (MS plans to drop support for Win7/8 in the next 2 years)

4) Poor VR support (next gen GPU's use a mix of hardware and DX12 to increase performance)

 

DX12 pros:

1) Better performance

2) Better driver support in 2+ years

3) Longer support lifespan

4) Quicker and easier development (DX12 has simplified API's compared to DX11)

5) Better control of VRAM usage

 

DX12 cons:

1) Some people will be running Win 7 in 2+ years and refuse to update, they cannot use DX12

2) No one knows how to use DX12 at this time, everyone is still learning

[Dakpilot]

"Within Direct3D 11, the commands are sent from the CPU to the GPU one by one, and the GPU works through these commands sequentially. This means that commands are bottlenecked by the speed at which the CPU could send these commands in a linear fashion. Within DirectX 12 these commands are sent as command lists, containing all the required information within a single package. The GPU is then capable of computing and executing this command in one single process, without having to wait on any additional information from the CPU.

Within these command lists are bundles. Where previously commands were just taken, used, and then forgotten by the GPU, bundles can be reused. This decreases the workload of the GPU and means repeated assets can be used much faster.

While resource binding is fairly convenient in Direct3D 11 for developers at the moment, its inefficiency means several modern hardware capabilities are being drastically underused. When a game engine needed resources in DX11, it had to draw the data from scratch every time, meaning repeat processes and unnecessary uses. In Direct3D 12, descriptor heaps and tables mean the most often used resources can be allocated by developers in tables, which the GPU can quickly and easily access. This can contribute to better performance than Direct3D 11 on equivalent hardware, but it also entails more work for the developer.

Dynamic Heaps are also a feature of Direct3D 12"

 

Seemed to be a concise description of some of the benefits of DX12 in a way i can understand, the fact that it involves more work for Dev's than DX11 is a bit of a kicker though

Cheers Dakpilot

[Mainstay]

All i can say is the sooner they start working on moving the engine on DX11 or DX12 the better. 

 

@ Scarecrow i also grew up in the time of the Atari, spectrum, C64 and Amiga but i do care about graphics. 

 

The graphics in IL2 as they are now are mediocre max. 

Like King Hrothgar i also doubt i will buy any future part/episode/theatre or whatever in the series if they stick to DX9. 

DX9 is done and the sooner people start realising this the better. 

 

Yes i want better dynamic shadows, volumetric smoke, higher resolution textures, higher drawing distances, higher amount of drawn objects etc etc.... 

Edited May 17, 2016 by Mainstay

[SharpeXB]

I'm surprised to see this

DX12 - I'm not sure, it will cut many (or most) of our customers video hardware.

DX 10/11 is more possible.

 

According to the Steam Hardware Survey 43% have DX12 plus Windows 10

Another 28% have a DX12 GPU and could simply upgrade their OS

That's 71% right now. By the time a new game engine would be ready, DX12 would be almost universal.

The performance benefits from DX11 aren't worth the effort, you can see that from DCS, EDGE doesn't have the ability to run the first gen of VR headsets at even half the recommended frame rate. It's still too CPU bound. Doing anything less than DX12 would be a wasted effort. If they're going to upgrade the engine, go all the way. It's not likely to be redone anytime soon. Go big.

Edited June 15, 2016 by SharpeXB