Unity 5.4 will add DX12 in March, will Guns of Icarus support it?

[Typhi]

Hey guys!

Long time no see! Didn't really play the game over the last year or something, since I was awaiting some significant updates. Now the game sometimes had some terrible performance for me (AMD user) especially in 4v4 when a lot is going on. Now I wondered if the game will will support Unity 5.4 and therefor also have DX12, so it atleast get's some significant improvement in hectic situations when a lot of drawcalls have to be done.

Source: https://unity3d.com/unity/roadmap

[Squidslinger Gilder]

Muse talked about DX12 in a Fireside last year. Maybe more than once. Basically comes down to compatibility and if new Unity updates don't bring a slew of new bugs with it. They do test them and if it breaks more things than fixes, Muse doesn't do it. Pretty iffy we'll see DX12 features super fast.

Besides that they just last year added a DX11 mode for the game. Not sure what that all entails but we'd more likely see extensions on that before DX12. Also some of the feature sets in DX12 are the same ones that were implemented in DX11.1 and 11.2. Which no one really supported because no one bought Windows 8. Hence why ASYNC compute now starts to matter because Windows 10 adoption is much greater.

On top of all that, even the studios working on DX12 games right now state the difficulties in changing over their development to it. ARK devs have continued to push back the DX12 version of ARK, citing all sorts of issues.

DX12 isn't some simple switch to turn on and enable amazing performance like a lot of the hype stated it would be.

[Typhi]

Haha, yeap I do know that, it's not a simple switch. Yet now it will come in Unity it sure becomes a lot easier! Anyway, here is the solution for the multiplatform stuff https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/

[ZnC]

AMD released Vulkan! I tested it on Talos Principle.

Average
Vulkan: 78 FPS
D3D 11: 112 FPS



Well it's gonna take a while to have games that are compatible and optimized for it.

[Watchmaker]

Pretty much what Gilder said: taking advantage of low-level APIs like DX12 or Vulkan requires a) Unity to do the support for us and b) Unity to not break anything else in the process.  You may have noticed that we still haven't upgraded Guns to Unity 5, basically because their new lightmapping solution fails point b) for us.