For sure DX9 is a solid platform. It is just like Windows XP. Is works flawless, it is loved by many but it lacks support for modern technology. How much effort lies in the upgrade to DX11 can be seen at rF2. They have it released to the public exactly one year ago. They had to struggle with massive fps decrease, had to upgrade all their content step by step just for the reason it looks mostly the same as before. If you switched on the render options you had massively blooming items everywhere on the screen Now the time has come for them to introduce new shaders and materials which will bring some eyecandy. I am just saying do not expect a massive improve of graphics just by switching over to DX11 out of the box. What I see is pulling drivers to other titles is endurance racing with day/night cycle and driver changes. When you read about weather many people only think about rain and nobody really wants to drive in awful weather. So why not dynamically changing sun, clouds and even some fog for our british guys. Light effects with moving clouds and changing track temperatures is something which has become standard. Even for the old AC with this awesome SOL mod. So comparing RR to all other competitors (AC, ACC, iR, rF2, PC2) I would guess the technology is at least 3 years behind in many aspects. Anyway RR is my preferred sim and we wouldn't cry here if we would not care and absolutely love RR
That's why Microsoft are panicking and moving in the same direction, cloud this, cloud that, prefer clear skies myself but the train is rolling and there's no stopping it now! *The more I read on Vulkan the more I like the sound of it over alternatives but if I'm honest, more my eye sight fails the more I want RR to stay as it is, not that I don't want the plethora of features that are sadly lacking, just the pure fear of losing the experience I get now when I hop in my rig and fire up RR, losing that would be like losing my right arm!
The only thing I'm hunting for, when I hear "newer DX" is: Away from Signle Thread Optimization. Most of us have a Multicore Processor but most of the cores are sleeping well when driving in R3E and especially in VR this causes pain in the ass. So I really like the whole graphics thing in R3E, add a SRS thing, that more people drive here online and give the sleeping cores a go. Then I will be very happy.
Ok, then, developers please allow us buy your DX9 premium package for offline racing prior to moving to any other engine... i would pay for it
Yeah, if doing a complete engine move, essentially meaning a new platform / game, I too would like to also keep what I currently have and have the option of using the new platform. Looking at AC to ACC, currently its quite different (ignoring content and its focus) and "engine limitations" is often cited here there and everywhere (proper triple screen support for one)... would hate for that to be the case here. At least ACC is a new game, completely seperate from AC. That's how it should be, particularly with a major engine change.. However, I am very fond of the current model too, with ongoing updates and content packs too. I think its much more desirable than say "Pcars - a completely new game every couple of years"
I don't think that DX11 is urgently necessary. R3E looks better than rF2 in every aspect and not very much worse than AC for example. There are other construction sites which are more important.
RR is currently my favorite Sim, It just feels great. However DX9 annoyes me in VR because even with the newest hardware I am stuck with 45 FPS. For me: I would pay 100€ for crowd founding DX11/Vulcan and some cars/tracks when it‘s done. I don‘t want rain only day and night for endurance. I already invested enough money and I want to keep it alife.
Sorry, DX11 move isn't only the look, it's more under the hood. Multicoreimplementation e.g. VR don't run well with DX9 because of this.
There are countless threads in simracing forums regarding mostly older titles like R3E, AMS and previously rF2 that repeat the Direct X upgrade to some newer version or in some cases Vulcan. First of all, Direct X is just an API and and just making direct conversion from API to next, for example to newer direct X version, most likely benefits the performance somewhere from zero fps to something very little. Vice versa, API doesn't automatically guarantee improved graphichs, and you can practically make game that uses all the DX11 bells and whistles look just as good with DX9, but performance hit would be huge and work complicated. However, there are some benefits of just doing direct conversion under the hood, like avoiding mirroring parts of VRAM to RAM, but this isn't exactly an issue with 64-bit titles. To benefit from the API conversion, you need to code your engine so, that it can make use of the more advanced and effective features of new APIs. There is a lot work related to this and even then, the end results especially from the performance side of things are far from guaranteed. There are probably dozens of examples to prove this. In the early days of the DX10 or 11 there were many games that had both DX9 and DX10/11 renderers. Often games looked identical, sans perhaps some effect or couple added in some titles, and in many cases the performance was identical or in some cases better with DX9 version. People had high expectations back in the day about rF2 upgrade, but to this day, it hasn't probably reached the performance level of the DX9 version or is at par, maximum. There are titles and configurations, which do not even benefit from DX11 to DX12 conversion, where low level API should theoretically offer significant improvement. Performance just depends on so many factors, where API and graphics engine in general, is just one part of the equation. All in all, API itself doesn't mean anything and what people are actually asking, is a graphichs engine re-write or new graphichs engine. Everyone should also remember, that gains can be minimal if application is bottlenecked somewhere else. Because results are far from guaranteed and work is significant, I can understand developers' hesitation doing this. Writing the engine for newer API while writing a new project from scratch is natural thing to do, but updating an old one can be a big task without guranteed improvements, especially if dev resources are limited. Most efficient way of doing this would probably be adapting a well known and optimized graphics engine, like UE, but there is still the huge task of implementing rest of the game, that is mainly the physics engine, to it.
Agreeing with most of it, however R3E is "simple enough" of a game (think of the other ISI titles, AMS, RACE07 etc.), that we can assume that graphics is the main bottleneck As someone mentioned for rf2, that assets (content) pipeline also needs to updated, so yes this whole undertaking has a bigger tail to it, which is why it simply cannot "just" happen. The issue with UE4 is that it's not really just a graphics engine, so due to all that other work and making things run within a pretty big architecture, you would spend significant resources as well. Which imo for their target market (more people more important than latest gfx) makes less sense. I'd also be happy to kickstart fund something like a bigger rewrite. But essentially we are talking about gathering a lot of money that experts can be hired to do this within a year or so.