Alik.9651 Posted July 12, 2021 Share Posted July 12, 2021 I'm just curious why still putting effort on the relatively old API (DX11)? Why not DX12 or Vulkan? DX12 is now support from Win7 (though not fully supported) Vulkan is supported by a bunch of OSs, we might get the mac client back, even run GW2 on mobiles (though the UI is not fit ...) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ayrilana.1396 Posted July 12, 2021 Share Posted July 12, 2021 (edited) 8 minutes ago, Alik.9651 said: I'm just curious why still putting effort on the relatively old API (DX11)? Why not DX12 or Vulkan? DX12 is now support from Win7 (though not fully supported) Vulkan is supported by a bunch of OSs, we might get the mac client back, even run GW2 on mobiles (though the UI is not fit ...) Because the difference between DX12 to the previous versions is substantial. Some people have compared it to going from JavaScript to C++. It’d be the same situation with Vulkan as I believe it operates similarly to DX12. Edited July 12, 2021 by Ayrilana.1396 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dawdler.8521 Posted July 12, 2021 Share Posted July 12, 2021 They googled "how to convert from DX9 to DX11 in minutes" when they couldnt find any similar results for DX12? 1 14 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vilin.8056 Posted July 12, 2021 Share Posted July 12, 2021 Because legacy OS such as Windows 7 supports it. We still have a large portion of population running this game on old hardwares with an old OS. 3 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Astralporing.1957 Posted July 12, 2021 Share Posted July 12, 2021 Because their main goal is not upgrading Dx version. It is rewriting the engine in such a way it's no longer as bound by single thread as it is now. Moving to dx11 offers them the best cost/results option for that. And opens up a way to easier engine changes later on, if they might so desire. 8 3 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fatihso.7258 Posted July 12, 2021 Share Posted July 12, 2021 While I agree with new ways being opened up, reading this Reddit post and checking the charts included in the shared article raises questions and alerts about near future of the game and overall performance if they are to go with dx11. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ashantara.8731 Posted July 12, 2021 Share Posted July 12, 2021 13 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said: Because their main goal is not upgrading Dx version. It is rewriting the engine in such a way it's no longer as bound by single thread as it is now. Moving to dx11 offers them the best cost/results option for that. And opens up a way to easier engine changes later on, if they might so desire. Unfortunately, none of these assumptions are correct. As explained in the link posted above: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/ocwky5/on_the_directx_11_announcement/ 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Astralporing.1957 Posted July 12, 2021 Share Posted July 12, 2021 (edited) 1 hour ago, Ashantara.8731 said: Unfortunately, none of these assumptions are correct. As explained in the link posted above: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/ocwky5/on_the_directx_11_announcement/ In that thread i see a lot of people, none with actual knowledge of GW2 engine or GW2 dev intentions, trying to push their own theories. And not agreeing on pretty much anything. Edited July 12, 2021 by Astralporing.1957 3 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Doomfrost.5728 Posted July 12, 2021 Share Posted July 12, 2021 Dx9 has gone the way like other previous Dx# versions. For as long as it's endured it's past the age of retirement. It'll be14 years since it's last update come July 27th. Dx12 is still relatively new compared to Dx11, the amount of players that possibly have Dx12 capable hardware is probably dwarfed by those that have Dx11 capable systems. I'm sure 14 years is enough time for people to own hardware that's Dx11 ready, I'm sure they have the data to support it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alik.9651 Posted July 13, 2021 Author Share Posted July 13, 2021 On 7/12/2021 at 3:03 PM, Vilin.8056 said: Because legacy OS such as Windows 7 supports it. We still have a large portion of population running this game on old hardwares with an old OS. Isn't Microsoft port DX12 to Win7 since 2019? If not, then go for Vulkan, Vulkan runs on Android, Linux, Tizen, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, iOS, and macOS It will benefit Linux and mac users, and may be someday we can run GW2 on a M1 mac (some rumor said M1X is almost powerful as RTX3070) 18 hours ago, Ashantara.8731 said: Unfortunately, none of these assumptions are correct. As explained in the link posted above: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/ocwky5/on_the_directx_11_announcement/ Well ... that post show DX11 is totally not good ... 15 hours ago, Doomfrost.5728 said: Dx9 has gone the way like other previous Dx# versions. For as long as it's endured it's past the age of retirement. It'll be14 years since it's last update come July 27th. Dx12 is still relatively new compared to Dx11, the amount of players that possibly have Dx12 capable hardware is probably dwarfed by those that have Dx11 capable systems. I'm sure 14 years is enough time for people to own hardware that's Dx11 ready, I'm sure they have the data to support it. I think 6yrs is also enough time for people to own H/W support DX12 lol DX12 was launched at July 29, 2015 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phokus.8934 Posted July 13, 2021 Share Posted July 13, 2021 6 minutes ago, Alik.9651 said: Isn't Microsoft port DX12 to Win7 since 2019? If not, then go for Vulkan, Vulkan runs on Android, Linux, Tizen, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, iOS, and macOS It will benefit Linux and mac users, and may be someday we can run GW2 on a M1 mac (some rumor said M1X is almost powerful as RTX3070) Well ... that post show DX11 is totally not good ... I think 6yrs is also enough time for people to own H/W support DX12 lol DX12 was launched at July 29, 2015 DX12 is for Windows 10, however game developers can utilize DX12 for Windows 7. For instance, you can use DX12 for WoW on Windows 7 because that's how Blizzard designed the game. I'd say Vulkan is the next move but we probably are quite a few years away from that catching on mainstream. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DoomNexus.5324 Posted July 13, 2021 Share Posted July 13, 2021 (edited) TL;DR: The devs would have to basically learn to use a completely different API as the approach of dx12 is vastly different than dx11 (and dx9). GW2 would not benefit from dx12 much as this even partially conflicts with the target audience of an MMO. By deciding to use dx12 features Anet would possibly exclude a certain number of players or force them to upgrade some hardware components (more than with dx11 already that is). Comment: The main advantages of dx12 over dx11 is that devs can optimize for specific hardware and draw call optimization. Optimizing for specific hardware is obviously great if you want to specifically support Nvidia 20xx and 30xx cards for raytracing and stuff or a specific console. However for an MMO this is pretty irrelevant or may even bring more issues than it can solve as there are vast differences in terms of hardware specs across all players. Some use super old cpus/gpus and some use high-end stuff. You have to meet the people at the lowest common denominator that still kinda works with what you try to achieve. This doesn't come for free (otherwise it could've been included in dx11 or previous versions) and devs have to code much more "precise" (for lack of a better description) to achieve the same goals as someone pointed out earlier: On 7/12/2021 at 7:16 AM, Ayrilana.1396 said: Because the difference between DX12 to the previous versions is substantial. Some people have compared it to going from JavaScript to C++. Regarding draw call optimization, I don't really know for sure how dx12 manages to optimize it but I can only imagine that it requires newer chip sets aka a lot of people with older hardware (even though they could technically still run the game perfectly fine) suddenly can't play it anymore because their chips don't support shader model XY or something like that. Upgrading from dx9 to dx11 will probably already cause some issues for people with old rigs, however maybe not as bad as going to dx12. The jump from dx9 to dx11 will already be massive, I wouldn't worry about gw2 not going to dx12 as it just is not worth it. Edited July 13, 2021 by DoomNexus.5324 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KrHome.1920 Posted July 13, 2021 Share Posted July 13, 2021 (edited) Draw calls are still a huge issue in DX11. Batching draw calls won't do wonders. Don't expect significant performance gains with that API. Like I said in pretty much ever thread regarding this topic: a simple shader cache does more for the performance than switching from DX9 to 11. What I hope they will do, is adding such a cache with the new API. This will increase loading times (the precaching is done during loading the map) but significantly reduce draw calls = CPU overhead when you are in the actual game. Why they don't switch to DX12/Vulkan might have different reasons: old hardware and old OS support and also the effort you have to put into the rework of your engine to get the API working. Quote Regarding draw call optimization, I don't really know for sure how dx12 manages to optimize it DX12 and Vulkan (formerly known as AMD Mantle) don't have a mainthread anymore. Your whole game logic can be spread on different threads. You can almost ignore draw calls with these APIs. They pretty much never bottleneck your CPU. Edited July 13, 2021 by KrHome.1920 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Khisanth.2948 Posted July 13, 2021 Share Posted July 13, 2021 (edited) The minimum system requirements for GPU listed on the purchase page is NVIDIA® GeForce® 8800GTS and ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT. One of those supports DX11 and the other DX10. DX11 can run on DX9.1-10.0 hardware. DX12 requires at least DX11 level hardware. Vulkan would also require newer hardware based on https://www.khronos.org/conformance/adopters/conformant-products/vulkan. So DX11 is the highest version they can go without increasing the minimum system requirements. I think that is one of the simplest explanations and doesn't require much speculations ... Also the refactoring that DX11 will probably give bigger performance gains than the further optimizations that DX12 allows for. Assuming they account for a potential DX12 upgrade path in the rewrite/refactor then choosing 11 is the better choice right now since it allows them to move forward without having to commit to DX12 and without increasing the system requirements. Edited July 13, 2021 by Khisanth.2948 2 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zephire.8049 Posted July 13, 2021 Share Posted July 13, 2021 7 hours ago, Alik.9651 said: I think 6yrs is also enough time for people to own H/W support DX12 lol DX12 was launched at July 29, 2015 Not when cyrpto has jacked up the price of a new gen card from $600-$800 to over $3k unless you win a lottery to buy it at "just" MSRP at ~$1300. It's also prevented older generation cards from dropping in cost like in the past. For most people, there's simply no point in spending $600 for a card that's years old, especially when there's bills to pay and nearly all games support DX11. And that's assuming their motherboard can even support a DX12 GPU. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dash.3179 Posted July 14, 2021 Share Posted July 14, 2021 Has everyone forgotten that a DX11 version was planned before launch and then scrapped? There're probably some early incomplete builds of GW2 already using it that have been found in the archives , and developing it is an easy win for more (sorely needed) performance and compatability now that dual-core CPUs are going the way of the Dodo & 6+ cores are on the rise. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yolowolf.3864 Posted August 10, 2021 Share Posted August 10, 2021 Old thread, I know, but it's one of the relevant ones when googling and I wanted to provide a rebuttal to a particular post that I believe contains a shockingly accurate technical explanation all while being an incredible piece of misinformation. On 7/12/2021 at 4:30 PM, fatihso.7258 said: While I agree with new ways being opened up, reading this Reddit post and checking the charts included in the shared article raises questions and alerts about near future of the game and overall performance if they are to go with dx11. The person in this post isn't lying/wrong about the technical information they're sharing (to the best of my knowledge, I'm not a developer, just an enthusiast/programmer), but they are weirdly omitting information as if they desperately want to convince people that this will do nothing for the game for some bizarre reason. DX11 absolutely has more tools in it than DX9 does for better multithreading and just generally increasing CPU performance. They aren't wrong that DX12 or Vulkan would massively improve on that as well, but they chose their examples very carefully, or perhaps didn't find any evidence that didn't fit their narrative. There is even an existing example of an MMO going from DX9 to DX11 and having major improvements, FFXIV. In CPU bound scenarios, performance can increase by nearly double in DX11 compared to the DX9 renderer, at the same settings of course, and provided sufficient hardware. It will vary, multithreading a task will have some overhead compared to that single threaded code, so it's important that the hardware is able to run enough threads simultaneously (and fast enough) for that overhead to be very worth it. Ultimately, the update will speak for itself, either way it goes. Updating to a new API isn't magic, ArenaNet will have to properly utilize it. If they port and are basically just mapping their dx9 calls to dx11 calls, then it'll run pretty darn similar, but based on the post they made about taking the performance issues seriously, I don't think that'll be the case. Doesn't make sense to make the financial investment if they aren't going to do it right. They also plan on launching the game on steam sometime soon, and they have to be aware that the game will not gain much of a new audience if the first impression, for a game that looks like this in 2021, is "wow this runs like crap". 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Follyfoot.2803 Posted August 10, 2021 Share Posted August 10, 2021 (edited) I always thought that DX12 was a way to blackmail you into joining windows 10. Nothing more. We will probably see DX13 for windows 11. In the end DX12 is kitten. Edited August 10, 2021 by Follyfoot.2803 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alcopaul.2156 Posted August 10, 2021 Share Posted August 10, 2021 (edited) ez DX9 DX11 9/11 Tengu confirmed.. XD 2X 9/11 91 11 9+1 = 10 = Rooster 9- = 6 = Snake 11 = Composite one and one = one Rooster & one Snake 9/11/2001 "Birds Unifying with standing Cobras" GG Edited August 10, 2021 by alcopaul.2156 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now