Ideas And Suggestions! (features and game mechanics)

You can use Directx11 with Directx10 hardware. That's why I said 90% (60% dx11 hw, 30% dx10 hw). Unity is more casual games, if you look at Steam stats http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/ it's 80% dx11 hw.

 

Hm, maybe a Poll here in the Forum about the installed Graphiccards would be interessting.

Intel-Chips, Nvidia and AMD would be relevant I think...

 

This is what I was referring to:

 

But whats the usage behind that numbers?
Have a look at the usernumbers of AC, Pcars... even the early Access on Dirt Rally or Wreckfest... and aside Racingsims other Games are only using DX11 or switching to it and nobody complaints...

 

In the end it's not really important. As far as I understood the nature of DirectX, it's not the hardware that needs to support it, but the software. If the hardware does not support any given feature, it will be emulated in software, meaning the CPU will have to deal with it. This means a drastic loss in performance of course. And if you can specifically disable all DX10+ functionalities you shouldn't even have to deal with it. If driver support for any hardware has been discontinued, than this might look different of course. When you need to install an old driver to support your hardware, the driver might not be DX11-compatible in itself.

But I also strongly agree with @m.bohlken that at least 5 years after the introduction of DX11 in hardware we shouldn't need to bother about this. Hardware this old in most cases isn't capable of giving a pleasant experience for RRRE anyway.

And regarding the possibility of pre-Vista Windows' - to be honest I don't want my computer to go into p2p mode to another computer still running WinXP or worse which is still being connected to the internet...

 

Hey shardshunt, you've just been called a nobody.

I didn't bring up those statistics, I just read what they actually say and they say that a third of the users represented in it can't use games that don't support DX9.

But what do the user numbers of AC or PC actually tell us on the matter of DX9 support? People running an older system avoid those and accept the decision that's been made rather than complain. Nevertheless there are players with older systems, and who don't care about the security threat of using XP cause they run a dedicated racing system, who couldn't use R3E (anymore) if we were to drop DX9 support.

 

but at the same time, when the VR headsets finally hit the market R3E's continued use of DX9 is going to limit its market somewhat

 

No arguing that.

Seeing that Wreckfest managed the switch, it can be done for sure, but it would need lots a re-coding work I guess, or building a new engine, which is what wreckfest did, didn't they?

Ideally they'd support all modes, like the aforementioned STALKER, you can simply switch dx modes manually. Not sure if that would need even more work though.

Dropping DX9 would be imprudent tho I think.

 

Time to move on I think. It's a fact of PC gaming that you need to upgrade hardware from time to time. The few shouldn't hold back the many.

 

As folks have already bought the game, you can't simply drop DX9 support - it's got to stay in. Which means the devs would end up supporting 2 rendering engines. Not a nice solution but if they want it to work with the Rift I can't see any other approach

 

They could potentially lose more players by not supporting Rift via DX11. It's that important for sim racing.

 

before we go on about this topic, probably best to spawn off its own thread, which probably already exists

 

Very classic liberalist view I'd say. The statistics say those few are 35 % and seeing that you live in the UK I'd like to remind you and everyone else that there are many countries in the world where people don't have it as cozy as we have it.
There are many people that cannot afford the latest hardware, even every few years, but have to deal with what they can afford, which by our standards is low end hardware.

And I'm not talking bout people starving, I'm talking bout many regular Joe's in South America, Brazil in particular, in Russia and its former satelites and wide parts of Asia. There are many racing (sim) fan(atics) there who can only dream about such luxurious gadgets as an Oculus Rift and I think we shouldn't be so uppity and elitist to dismiss those people by saying that if they cannot afford the latest tech they should be excluded from the sim racing community.

Just my .02. I have nothing against introducing dx11 or 12 or whatever, but we should avoid making such changes at the cost of a huge amount of people who have it worse than us, on our blessed island ( meaning western industrialized countries in general, not only the UK).

One love.

 

Maybe Sector3 has access to statistics provided by Steam as Steam knows the Hardware of the users and knows who is playing which game. Should be an easy one...

Based on those informations a careful decision could be made.

 

I appreciate those points @Christian Göpfert but as @m.bohlken alluded to, that 35% may not be reflective of the R3E user base where I would speculate a larger majority is running DX11 cards due to the hardware intensive nature of simulation software.

As I said, PC gaming carries the requirement that hardware needs to be upgraded periodically to play the latest games, the same way you buy the latest console every five or six years.

Edit - the competition is already running DX11 or making the transition, so it's something I feel has to happen. Dropping DX9 would have to be a careful decision though.

 

Damn it, using my own stats against this The Steam stats say 80% of steam users are on dx11 hardware, 17% on dx10 hw (both can be run with dx11). R3E officially requires Vista and higher, hence I think you can ignore most of those 30% of the Unity stats.

You can run dx10 hardware with dx11 api, you just cannot use dx11 effects such as tessellation... and there is other restrictions. You would never fallback to CPU emulation of any features (that would never be acceptable) you would just not use the features.

an api switch indeed has to done "well" you can easily screw up an optimized dx9 system when transitioning. so I agree it's not a no-brainer, but it is inevitable.

 

NVIDIA GeForce 315M
mine does not support 11 just so you know we are out thier.

 

No beef ma man.

I get what you're all about and I actually support it, just wouldn't want to see people excluded because they have to make ends meet on low incomes.

I agree that not getting some kind of support for OR would be a nono, but I'd strongly object to a switch to dx11 but would rather an extension with dx11.

 

There is a Windows 10 driver with the version 341.74 from July 29. 2015 for the 300M series of chips.

A quote from the download page:

So there even is a DX12-compatible driver for your chip available. As said before you will not be able to use DX10+ functionality in hardware, but as long as there is a driver for your chip, that supports the DX-version used, you should have no problems.

When I was younger and had very little money at hand, my PC was quite outdated too most of the time and I rarely had a graphics card with a recent DX-version in hardware. But still all new games were always running. Slow, but they were running.

 

@Arthur Spooner that dx12 statement about nv working with ms is generic, it has nothing to do with that particular hardware supporting dx12. Dx12 requires a driver using the new wddm2 system, which will only be provided for dx11 hw.

Emulation for fps critical games on old (already slow) systems imo makes no sense.

In the early dx days there was more partial sw emulation of big featured (for example for vertex shaders) and cpus were relatively beefy compared to gpus, this is not true anymore: it's either fully emulated or not at all.

The gf 315 m can be run with dx11 runtime fully accelerated as long as the developer supports it.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff476876(v=vs.85).aspx