DirectX 12 will be upon us soon with Windows 10 launching close to the end of July. Opinions have been mixed on the same – some developers believe it will lead to an incremental boost in graphics capability while others think it won’t make that much difference.
Speaking to GamingBolt, Teotl Studios founder Sjoerd de Jong – who’s working on the Unreal Engine 4-based The Solus Project – about his take on DirectX 12 and whether it will be a game changer for graphics. de Jong said that, “I haven’t been following the DX12 news very closely so I don’t know too much about it.
“That being said, again the tools are absolutely key for us to progress first and foremost as mentioned, plus also we got quite good graphics already in the industry nowadays. We are actually seeing a shift towards gameplay and story nowadays especially in smaller productions, with less emphasis on graphics. So given all that I do not think that DX12 will be a game changer.”
It’ll still take some time before DirectX 12 games come out, roughly a year in fact. However, given that it’s exclusive to Windows 10, just how many people will have shifted to the new OS?
de Jong said, “Still, you would not make a game just for that platform, because half of your consumers are still going to be on Windows 7 or something similar or not have a DX12 compatible card, by that time. It takes several years usually to shift a people to a new platform. I don’t see it happening any time soon.
“DirectX11 went well because when it came out we also got a new generation of consoles, and at the same time you had native DX11 engines like Unreal Engine 4 coming out. Plus it ran on Vista/Win 7/Win 8 so everyone could use it. But for example with DirectX10, that never happened because it didn’t had all of those kind of things happenings to support its launch.”
We’ll see how it fares next year but in the meantime, let us know your thoughts on the potential of DirectX 12 in the comments.