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Frostbite Tech Director wants DX12 to be mandatory in 2016

by Mark Tyson on 9 April 2015, 11:35

Tags: Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:EA), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)

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Frostbite Technical Director, Johan Andersson, has taken to Twitter to voice his yearning for Microsoft's DirectX 12 to become the minimum spec in EA/Frostbite games. Frostbite is a powerful graphics engine behind games such as Battlefield and Dragon's Age: Inquisition but could offer so much more with a minimum user spec of Windows 10, DirectX 12 and WDDM 2.0.

By his own admission Andersson thinks that a goal of holiday 2016 for all Frostbite games to require DX12 and WDDM 2.0 is a bit "aggressive", and we might call his hopes optimistic. However the "major benefits," gamers could experience from the modern graphics API and memory management are obvious to him. Jacob Freeman from EVGA chirped in to say that the holiday 2016 timescale isn't such a fanciful idea as "Win10 will be free and DX12 capable cards have a pretty large install base, so seems like good timing".

In follow-up Tweets by Andersson, pondering the future, he thought that "the Win10 adoption within core gamers will be _really_ quite fast, and Microsoft is helping with their upgrade program". However it is still uncertain whether Microsoft will achieve the every-other-version of Windows rip-roaring success with the imminent Windows 10, even though it is to be free for Windows 7 (and newer) owners.

The Frostbite engine was last seen in Dragon Age Inquistion and Andersson hinted that there have been some significant upgrades to the engine in the meantime. We should get our first peek at its progress in a week's time, at the Star Wars Celebration event, where Star Wars Battlefront gameplay should be seen. Frostbite is also going to be the engine behind the upcoming Mass Effect 4, expected to be released within a year from now.



HEXUS Forums :: 7 Comments

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I wouldn't call it too aggressive but I would call it a tad optimistic (based on history).

They are talking about titles a year away. Surely adding DX12 optimisations could quite easily still be part of the engine work (which is surely a constant WIP).

Obviously you may not get every little performance-enhancing feature in there but some of the larger ones should still be easily doable……also as Windows 10 will be free for Windows 7 users, I don't think it would be a great leap to add Windows 10 as a minimum requirement for “holiday 2016” titles.
Perhaps he should target Vulkan than, I presume that can run on Win 7 given it derives from Mantle.
DanceswithUnix
Perhaps he should target Vulkan than, I presume that can run on Win 7 given it derives from Mantle.

I doubt they will get a multi-million dollar payout to develop for Vulkan, like they did with Mantle….although you would think in these days of Windows, Mac, Linux, XB1 and PS4, people would be jumping on the OS-agnostic system!
Honestly, for me to switch from Windows 7 to Windows 10 the latter has to become and behave a lot more like the former than is currently the case. Windows 10 is a small step up from Windows 8(.1) but there's still way too much focus on “touch” and “mobility” in desktop mode. Not to mention lots of the features from Windows XP (yes, XP) they cut when moving to Vista.

Although I'll probably upgrade my Windows 8 license to Windows 10, since, as I wrote, it's at least a small step up. I doubt I'll upgrade to Windows 10 for DX12 only, though. Unless it gathers a massive amount of momentum and I just can't *not* upgrade.
The title is a bit misleading, and has lead to some really ugly comments on the same post made on Facebook.

Personally, I like the idea of Vulkan, and think that something that's truly cross platform would be the best thing to happen to PC gamers since the VooDoo2. But until somebody truly big comes along and starts pushing it, it's not going to be anything more than a far distant runner up. Everyone cheered and celebrated the demise of DX10/11 when GabeN announced SteamOS and ultimate support for OpenGL. Not sure about anyone else, but to me, it's been an extreme disappointment - just more lip service to the mass of followers who think the ground he walks on is hallowed (hint - it isn't.)