So, this is more for the devs but anyone with input is encouraged to post... Will anything change with BeamNG when DX12 rolls out? I don't know tons and tons about API's and the like, but is it something that is basically auto-implemented or does code need to be re-written and optimized? Will we (the players) see any performance increases with DX12?
I think the current focus is getting DX11 to work in Torque. Personally I think a limit is fast approaching in having both DX11/12 and BeamNG work together and still have playable FPS with anything other than a 24 core processor and octa SLI 980's. I'm quite happy with DX9.
DX11 runs better than DX9, it's better optimized and supports more advanced features of modern graphics card. However, while DX11 would be really nice, there's a thread a while back where tdev said that he was taking intesest in Vulkan/GLnext.
Yeah, I don't think Direct3D (DX) will be the path of Torque 3D, besides, it doesn't make sense. I think they will revamp it with Vulkan support (that is the successor to OpenGL). Vulkan is similar to DX12 anyways, it's just the open source and cross-platform alternative. I'd be disappointed if they went with DX12 rather than Vulkan.
they're working with the T3D devs to get opengl support so that both T3D and beamng can be brought to linux and mac os so it only makes sense to go with the newer vulkan API IMO, since then they would not only be able to bring t3d and beamng to linux and mac os, but they'd also get the major improvements of way better accesss to gpu cores, meaning they could also get a lot better performance out of the game graphics wise (not sure if it'd affect cpu performance, i'm not exactly an expert on this kind of thing)
Just to clarify, OpenGL has come to an end, Vulkan is a newborn API, a replacement built from scratch. It doesn't make sense to adopt an already outdated spec that's left for dead, so that leaves us with D3D 12 and Vulkan. The first being proprietary and Windows-only. Second being an open source API with similar features as D3D 12 in addition to cross-platform support. If you ask me, Vulkan is perfect. It might be a long walk, but I don't see why you'd make a little improvement that'd be outdated before you even start rather than just rewamp the whole engine. I don't know the size and time of the dev team, but with BeamNG on board backing it up there's possibilities.