Makes no difference to me whether the game ends up being dx9 or 11. If it were a single player then maybe, but its not and a couple of bells and whistles being there or not won't be noticed while im PvP'ing.
50% of all PCs still run Windows XP, and XP can maximum run DX9.
Noone in their right mind would cut out a potential audience of 50% for an MMO. For Crysis, yes, but not an MMO.
Well, you aren't going to cut them out by adding support for DX11. You just have a feature like WoW & LOTRO as well as others do to run the game in one or the other.
Makes no difference to me whether the game ends up being dx9 or 11. If it were a single player then maybe, but its not and a couple of bells and whistles being there or not won't be noticed while im PvP'ing.
DX10 or DX11 can also give a performance improvement, even if you dont use any of the "bells and whistles".
Originally posted by Rasputin
50% of all PCs still run Windows XP, and XP can maximum run DX9.
Noone in their right mind would cut out a potential audience of 50% for an MMO. For Crysis, yes, but not an MMO.
And that was in October 2011, the trend obviously continued. XP is also mostly used by professionals for their office work (why change, is works?), "serious" gamers have for most moved to Windows 7.
Respect, walk, what did you say? Respect, walk Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me? - PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
Makes no difference to me whether the game ends up being dx9 or 11. If it were a single player then maybe, but its not and a couple of bells and whistles being there or not won't be noticed while im PvP'ing.
DX10 or DX11 can also give a performance improvement, even if you dont use any of the "bells and whistles".
Originally posted by Rasputin
50% of all PCs still run Windows XP, and XP can maximum run DX9.
Noone in their right mind would cut out a potential audience of 50% for an MMO. For Crysis, yes, but not an MMO.
And that was in October 2011, the trend obviously continued. XP is also mostly used by professionals for their office work (why change, is works?), "serious" gamers have for most moved to Windows 7.
Strange, I have a completely different chart (from april 2012):
There's way too much hardware out there that still runs XP. The sweet spot as I see it, is to support DX11 and DX9c until DX9c obsoletes. Now that 11 is out, I don't see any reason for 10... although there may be some.
ArenaNet is quite strong on supporting old hardware. Only recently (within the last year) did they pull support for GuildWars running on Windows 98 SE. Even now GW still supports DX 8.1 rendering hardware.
Ken Fisher - Semi retired old fart Network Administrator, now working in Network Security. I don't Forum PVP. If you feel I've attacked you, it was probably by accident. When I don't understand, I ask. Such is not intended as criticism.
Cnet may just be wrong here. It was announced by all tech websites last October.
Weak explanation.
You have to tell me why your chart is valid and mine isnt.
Added links to my previous post. Enjoy.
Also, if you go on the site cnet uses as source in your link, you notice this: "This report contains preview data that has NOT been reviewed by Quality Assurance."
Respect, walk, what did you say? Respect, walk Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me? - PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
Cnet may just be wrong here. It was announced by all tech websites last October.
Weak explanation.
You have to tell me why your chart is valid and mine isnt.
He is right though, sadly cnet uses unverified sources for most of their 'charts'.
Basically, adding Dx11 support would not impede the game in anyway as game development are broken up into teams and if you believe a team working on Dx11 support would stop the game being 'complete' then you should be complaining about what other teams are working on during development.
Preferably I would wan't Dx11 support for the performance improvements over any 'bells and whistles'.
M
"Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys. Look on them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death!" - Sun Tzu, the Art of War
Who cares? The game looks good, that's what matters.
Originally posted by antshock35
Originally posted by Honner
Someone have knowledge or any idea of why gw2 used directX 9 instead of 11?
Because direct11 is so full of bugs? worst directx eva...f o r e v a...my sand lot impression.
I'm developing using DX11 regularly, and it's not more bugged than DX9 or DX10.
Yeah exactly, I think most people in this thread dont even know exactly what DirectX is, what it does or what is the difference between 9, 10 or 11.
Still funny to read some of the comments here :P, reminds me of a friend who once heard a coder complain about Bullet physics, and kept blaming everything on Bullet for any game anyone told him was running with Bullet as their physics engine. Its funny :P
Only thing that DX11 failed in my opinion was to solve the InputLayout interface which even MS admit wasnt a very good idea, it adds another level of complexity and doesnt really add any safeguards for you to mismatch inputs.
Cnet may just be wrong here. It was announced by all tech websites last October.
Weak explanation.
You have to tell me why your chart is valid and mine isnt.
Added links to my previous post. Enjoy.
Also, if you go on the site cnet uses as source in your link, you notice this: "This report contains preview data that has NOT been reviewed by Quality Assurance."
It seems PCWorld uses a similar "unverified" source.
There's way too much hardware out there that still runs XP. The sweet spot as I see it, is to support DX11 and DX9c until DX9c obsoletes. Now that 11 is out, I don't see any reason for 10... although there may be some.
ArenaNet is quite strong on supporting old hardware. Only recently (within the last year) did they pull support for GuildWars running on Windows 98 SE. Even now GW still supports DX 8.1 rendering hardware.
When DX10 came out, everyone in the Industry pretty much labelled it the API no one uses. Regarding your too much hardware, I beg to differ, not that Steam surveys are a global measure but they are a pretty good one, last time I looked 47% were running DX11 compliant Hardware, 35ish% DX10 compliant hardware.
The gap between bottom end and high end is definetely evening out, also since DX10 Microsoft move to enforce hardware manufacturers to be full compliant or not support it really helped push for everyone to have full compliant GPUs which helps greatly PC game developers.
Furthermore, because of the API updates, it is much harder to support DX9 and DX10 than it is DX10 and DX11, much of the interfaces are compatible between DX10 and DX11 which is not the case when you mix in DX9. Ofc this whole discussion only really matters if you are rolling your own tech, if you are using an estabilished engine then you dont have to worry about it, there is pretty solid support for most APIs and most of the feature set works seamlessly.
last time I looked 47% were running DX11 compliant Hardware, 35ish% DX10 compliant hardware.
Cool info. I didn't know that. In my own work I still support as far back as pixel shader 2.0. I had supported 1.1 and 1.4 but there's just too many restrictions to do interesting shader work on those toasters. :-)
Ken Fisher - Semi retired old fart Network Administrator, now working in Network Security. I don't Forum PVP. If you feel I've attacked you, it was probably by accident. When I don't understand, I ask. Such is not intended as criticism.
There's way too much hardware out there that still runs XP. The sweet spot as I see it, is to support DX11 and DX9c until DX9c obsoletes. Now that 11 is out, I don't see any reason for 10... although there may be some.
ArenaNet is quite strong on supporting old hardware. Only recently (within the last year) did they pull support for GuildWars running on Windows 98 SE. Even now GW still supports DX 8.1 rendering hardware.
When DX10 came out, everyone in the Industry pretty much labelled it the API no one uses. Regarding your too much hardware, I beg to differ, not that Steam surveys are a global measure but they are a pretty good one, last time I looked 47% were running DX11 compliant Hardware, 35ish% DX10 compliant hardware.
The gap between bottom end and high end is definetely evening out, also since DX10 Microsoft move to enforce hardware manufacturers to be full compliant or not support it really helped push for everyone to have full compliant GPUs which helps greatly PC game developers.
Furthermore, because of the API updates, it is much harder to support DX9 and DX10 than it is DX10 and DX11, much of the interfaces are compatible between DX10 and DX11 which is not the case when you mix in DX9.
Taking your numbers at face value (links are nice), it means that if you make DX11 version, you will accomodate only around half of the potential customer base. That means, that you are forced not only to support DX11, but also DX10 and/or DX9.
As a developer, no matter what you do, you MUST support DX9 as baseline (unless you create the next Crysis, with a limited potential customer base). But when you must support DX9, why even go further? Why not just stay at DX9, when the quality is so good?
Soon DX12 will come out, and one more version has to be supported. When does it end? It must be tempting to support the baseline only, and then raise the baseline, once the population has upgraded. Meaning, you can make a DirectX10-baseline when, say 80% can use it (as 45-50% of PCs still run XP it does not matter whether their hardware supports DX10+ or not).
It is Microsoft's own fault. They could have designed DirectX differently, maybe more modular, so a version could be expanded on the fly. At the very least they could have kept the number of DirectX versions down, instead of the current hailstorm of new versions, which probably is part of a planned obsolesence of hardware.
Developers need a level of stability. A game project takes 2-5 years, and as the development runs now, in that timespan 2 new DX-versions may come out.
last time I looked 47% were running DX11 compliant Hardware, 35ish% DX10 compliant hardware.
Cool info. I didn't know that. In my own work I still support as far back as pixel shader 2.0. I had supported 1.1 and 1.4 but there's just too many restrictions to do interesting shader work on those toasters. :-)
I havent work much with PCs lately, since I work with consoles we have a fixed feature set so no need for backwards compatibility.
I still think this is the way to drive PC gaming to move to new features sets, to develop for the latest stable API and not worry about backwards compatibility, ofc this would involve everyone following this strategy.
Once you try dynamic shader linking from Shader Model 5.0 you will be asking yourself why the hell have you bothered with anything other than that :P It's pretty sweet, and beats writing shader parsers to solve permutation issues.
There's way too much hardware out there that still runs XP. The sweet spot as I see it, is to support DX11 and DX9c until DX9c obsoletes. Now that 11 is out, I don't see any reason for 10... although there may be some.
ArenaNet is quite strong on supporting old hardware. Only recently (within the last year) did they pull support for GuildWars running on Windows 98 SE. Even now GW still supports DX 8.1 rendering hardware.
When DX10 came out, everyone in the Industry pretty much labelled it the API no one uses. Regarding your too much hardware, I beg to differ, not that Steam surveys are a global measure but they are a pretty good one, last time I looked 47% were running DX11 compliant Hardware, 35ish% DX10 compliant hardware.
The gap between bottom end and high end is definetely evening out, also since DX10 Microsoft move to enforce hardware manufacturers to be full compliant or not support it really helped push for everyone to have full compliant GPUs which helps greatly PC game developers.
Furthermore, because of the API updates, it is much harder to support DX9 and DX10 than it is DX10 and DX11, much of the interfaces are compatible between DX10 and DX11 which is not the case when you mix in DX9.
Taking your numbers at face value (links are nice), it means that if you make DX11 version, you will accomodate only around half of the potential customer base. That means, that you are forced not only to support DX11, but also DX10 and/or DX9.
As a developer, no matter what you do, you MUST support DX9 as baseline (unless you create the next Crysis, with a limited potential customer base). But when you must support DX9, why even go further? Why not just stay at DX9, when the quality is so good?
Soon DX12 will come out, and one more version has to be supported. When does it end? It must be tempting to support the baseline only, and then raise the baseline, once the population has upgraded. Meaning, you can make a DirectX10-baseline when, say 80% can use it (as 45-50% of PCs still run XP it does not matter whether their hardware supports DX10+ or not).
It is Microsoft's own fault. They could have designed DirectX differently, maybe more modular, so a version could be expanded on the fly. At the very least they could have kept the number of DirectX versions down, instead of the current hailstorm of new versions, which probably is part of a planned obsolesence of hardware.
Developers need a level of stability. A game project takes 2-5 years, and as the development runs now, in that timespan 2 new DX-versions may come out.
I partly agree to this, DX9 obviously needs to be supported, but why DX10 ? Rather just have DX9 and DX11 supported, and not DX10 at all. You don't need all the graphical features from DX11 to benefit from it - read below.
It's not just about quality, but perfomance as well, DX11 performance wise is hell of a lot better compared to DX9. There's a ton of shortcuts within the code that makes everything being computed faster than it ever would be possible on DX9.
There's way too much hardware out there that still runs XP. The sweet spot as I see it, is to support DX11 and DX9c until DX9c obsoletes. Now that 11 is out, I don't see any reason for 10... although there may be some.
ArenaNet is quite strong on supporting old hardware. Only recently (within the last year) did they pull support for GuildWars running on Windows 98 SE. Even now GW still supports DX 8.1 rendering hardware.
When DX10 came out, everyone in the Industry pretty much labelled it the API no one uses. Regarding your too much hardware, I beg to differ, not that Steam surveys are a global measure but they are a pretty good one, last time I looked 47% were running DX11 compliant Hardware, 35ish% DX10 compliant hardware.
The gap between bottom end and high end is definetely evening out, also since DX10 Microsoft move to enforce hardware manufacturers to be full compliant or not support it really helped push for everyone to have full compliant GPUs which helps greatly PC game developers.
Furthermore, because of the API updates, it is much harder to support DX9 and DX10 than it is DX10 and DX11, much of the interfaces are compatible between DX10 and DX11 which is not the case when you mix in DX9.
Taking your numbers at face value (links are nice), it means that if you make DX11 version, you will accomodate only around half of the potential customer base. That means, that you are forced not only to support DX11, but also DX10 and/or DX9.
As a developer, no matter what you do, you MUST support DX9 as baseline (unless you create the next Crysis, with a limited potential customer base). But when you must support DX9, why even go further? Why not just stay at DX9, when the quality is so good?
Soon DX12 will come out, and one more version has to be supported. When does it end? It must be tempting to support the baseline only, and then raise the baseline, once the population has upgraded. Meaning, you can make a DirectX10-baseline when, say 80% can use it (as 45-50% of PCs still run XP it does not matter whether their hardware supports DX10+ or not).
It is Microsoft's own fault. They could have designed DirectX differently, maybe more modular, so a version could be expanded on the fly. At the very least they could have kept the number of DirectX versions down, instead of the current hailstorm of new versions, which probably is part of a planned obsolesence of hardware.
Developers need a level of stability. A game project takes 2-5 years, and as the development runs now, in that timespan 2 new DX-versions may come out.
Here is the link http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ and I was mistaken it is actually 41% for DX11 and 36% for DX10, what I am saying is that if you support DX10 then you will still support the larger gaming population ( going by the Steam survey ).
DirectX 11 can also run on DirectX 9 hardware with the lowest feature set which is something that came in with DX 10.1, which means supporting DirectX 9 at all is a waste of time, it is almost a completely different paradigm to DX10 and DX11.
Remember when A.Net greated GW1, they were supporting early DX 6.0 or 7.0. By the time Nightfall campaign came out, they were supporting DX9.0 and the graphics were improved.
I think they will improve but whatever DX they support, they want to support the maximum number of PC's out there.
Here is the link http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ and I was mistaken it is actually 41% for DX11 and 36% for DX10, what I am saying is that if you support DX10 then you will still support the larger gaming population ( going by the Steam survey ).
DirectX 11 can also run on DirectX 9 hardware with the lowest feature set which is something that came in with DX 10.1, which means supporting DirectX 9 at all is a waste of time, it is almost a completely different paradigm to DX10 and DX11.
This surveys also shows clearly that a vast majority of gamers on PC are using Windows 7...
Comments
B/c it will sell more copies of the game with lower system requirements.
I recall this coming up as well on the official forums. However, I can't remember if it was Anet confirming or just speculation from the community.
Makes no difference to me whether the game ends up being dx9 or 11. If it were a single player then maybe, but its not and a couple of bells and whistles being there or not won't be noticed while im PvP'ing.
50% of all PCs still run Windows XP, and XP can maximum run DX9.
Noone in their right mind would cut out a potential audience of 50% for an MMO. For Crysis, yes, but not an MMO.
Well, you aren't going to cut them out by adding support for DX11. You just have a feature like WoW & LOTRO as well as others do to run the game in one or the other.
What does any of that have to do with whether GW2 will use dx11?
DX10 or DX11 can also give a performance improvement, even if you dont use any of the "bells and whistles".
http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/15/windows-7-overtakes-xp-globally-vista-found-weeping-in-a-corner/
And that was in October 2011, the trend obviously continued. XP is also mostly used by professionals for their office work (why change, is works?), "serious" gamers have for most moved to Windows 7.
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
It is cheaper to only target a single version.
And seriously, DX9 graphics are so good, that it more than suffices for a new AAA game, so why go through the hazzles of DX10-11?
The DX-versions are sprayed out now so fast, that it is already very hard to keep up as developers.
Strange, I have a completely different chart (from april 2012):
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57407968-75/windows-xp-wont-give-up-top-spot-without-a-fight/
Cnet may just be wrong here. It was announced by all tech websites last October.
http://www.slashgear.com/windows-7-passes-xp-in-global-usage-for-first-time-17188365/
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/msft-windows-xp-windows-7-market-share-win7,13876.html
http://www.clubic.com/windows-os/windows-7/actualite-450192-windows-7-devant-xp-part-de-marche-mondiale.html
etc...
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
There's way too much hardware out there that still runs XP. The sweet spot as I see it, is to support DX11 and DX9c until DX9c obsoletes. Now that 11 is out, I don't see any reason for 10... although there may be some.
ArenaNet is quite strong on supporting old hardware. Only recently (within the last year) did they pull support for GuildWars running on Windows 98 SE. Even now GW still supports DX 8.1 rendering hardware.
Weak explanation.
You have to tell me why your chart is valid and mine isnt.
Added links to my previous post. Enjoy.
Also, if you go on the site cnet uses as source in your link, you notice this: "This report contains preview data that has NOT been reviewed by Quality Assurance."
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
He is right though, sadly cnet uses unverified sources for most of their 'charts'.
Basically, adding Dx11 support would not impede the game in anyway as game development are broken up into teams and if you believe a team working on Dx11 support would stop the game being 'complete' then you should be complaining about what other teams are working on during development.
Preferably I would wan't Dx11 support for the performance improvements over any 'bells and whistles'.
M
"Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys. Look on them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death!"
- Sun Tzu, the Art of War
Support the Indie Developers - Kickstarter
Yeah exactly, I think most people in this thread dont even know exactly what DirectX is, what it does or what is the difference between 9, 10 or 11.
Still funny to read some of the comments here :P, reminds me of a friend who once heard a coder complain about Bullet physics, and kept blaming everything on Bullet for any game anyone told him was running with Bullet as their physics engine. Its funny :P
Only thing that DX11 failed in my opinion was to solve the InputLayout interface which even MS admit wasnt a very good idea, it adds another level of complexity and doesnt really add any safeguards for you to mismatch inputs.
It seems PCWorld uses a similar "unverified" source.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/242575/microsoft_to_windows_xp_please_die_already.html
When DX10 came out, everyone in the Industry pretty much labelled it the API no one uses. Regarding your too much hardware, I beg to differ, not that Steam surveys are a global measure but they are a pretty good one, last time I looked 47% were running DX11 compliant Hardware, 35ish% DX10 compliant hardware.
The gap between bottom end and high end is definetely evening out, also since DX10 Microsoft move to enforce hardware manufacturers to be full compliant or not support it really helped push for everyone to have full compliant GPUs which helps greatly PC game developers.
Furthermore, because of the API updates, it is much harder to support DX9 and DX10 than it is DX10 and DX11, much of the interfaces are compatible between DX10 and DX11 which is not the case when you mix in DX9. Ofc this whole discussion only really matters if you are rolling your own tech, if you are using an estabilished engine then you dont have to worry about it, there is pretty solid support for most APIs and most of the feature set works seamlessly.
Cool info. I didn't know that. In my own work I still support as far back as pixel shader 2.0. I had supported 1.1 and 1.4 but there's just too many restrictions to do interesting shader work on those toasters. :-)
Taking your numbers at face value (links are nice), it means that if you make DX11 version, you will accomodate only around half of the potential customer base. That means, that you are forced not only to support DX11, but also DX10 and/or DX9.
As a developer, no matter what you do, you MUST support DX9 as baseline (unless you create the next Crysis, with a limited potential customer base). But when you must support DX9, why even go further? Why not just stay at DX9, when the quality is so good?
Soon DX12 will come out, and one more version has to be supported. When does it end? It must be tempting to support the baseline only, and then raise the baseline, once the population has upgraded. Meaning, you can make a DirectX10-baseline when, say 80% can use it (as 45-50% of PCs still run XP it does not matter whether their hardware supports DX10+ or not).
It is Microsoft's own fault. They could have designed DirectX differently, maybe more modular, so a version could be expanded on the fly. At the very least they could have kept the number of DirectX versions down, instead of the current hailstorm of new versions, which probably is part of a planned obsolesence of hardware.
Developers need a level of stability. A game project takes 2-5 years, and as the development runs now, in that timespan 2 new DX-versions may come out.
I havent work much with PCs lately, since I work with consoles we have a fixed feature set so no need for backwards compatibility.
I still think this is the way to drive PC gaming to move to new features sets, to develop for the latest stable API and not worry about backwards compatibility, ofc this would involve everyone following this strategy.
Once you try dynamic shader linking from Shader Model 5.0 you will be asking yourself why the hell have you bothered with anything other than that :P It's pretty sweet, and beats writing shader parsers to solve permutation issues.
I partly agree to this, DX9 obviously needs to be supported, but why DX10 ? Rather just have DX9 and DX11 supported, and not DX10 at all. You don't need all the graphical features from DX11 to benefit from it - read below.
It's not just about quality, but perfomance as well, DX11 performance wise is hell of a lot better compared to DX9. There's a ton of shortcuts within the code that makes everything being computed faster than it ever would be possible on DX9.
Where exactly did you hear about this o.O?
Here is the link http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ and I was mistaken it is actually 41% for DX11 and 36% for DX10, what I am saying is that if you support DX10 then you will still support the larger gaming population ( going by the Steam survey ).
DirectX 11 can also run on DirectX 9 hardware with the lowest feature set which is something that came in with DX 10.1, which means supporting DirectX 9 at all is a waste of time, it is almost a completely different paradigm to DX10 and DX11.
Remember when A.Net greated GW1, they were supporting early DX 6.0 or 7.0. By the time Nightfall campaign came out, they were supporting DX9.0 and the graphics were improved.
I think they will improve but whatever DX they support, they want to support the maximum number of PC's out there.
This surveys also shows clearly that a vast majority of gamers on PC are using Windows 7...
Filtered for PC only: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/?platform=pc
Scroll down... Windows 7 = 56.35+15.51 = 71.86%
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023