Ark DX12 patch delayed indefintely (update Jan 2017- now Vulkan in the works)

[Notional]

Johan Andersson was probably the main dev of Mantle - he knows Mantle and this new APIs from the inside.

Exactly! Why I take his word on this as fact. Well that and he actually develops one of the best and most used graphics engines on the market.

[deviant88]

LoL its too hard to DX12/Vulkan in such a short time lol, the concurency and threading is hell lol, ark already has sucky performance last thing it needs is DX12 crashes ...

[Guest Kloaked]

Early access is such BS anyway just like pre ordering an excuse to do a lousy job.

There to many bad devs these day's working at big company's or even new company's, something should go horribly wrong already preferably with a big company like blizzard, so the rest finally learn not to mess with fan base.

 

That's why I urge people thinking about buying Ark or even H1Z1 to get Rust instead for their "survival" game.

 

Facepunch posts weekly dev and community blogs letting everyone know what's up about what exactly they're doing, and even going as far as asking what the community wants on particular instance (such as asking if they should focus on optimizations or content).

[Guest Kloaked]

Exactly! Why I take his word on this as fact. Well that and he actually develops one of the best and most used graphics engines on the market.

 

Most used? Hardly.

[MrStraightface]

Wildly unoptemized?

Lol I don't think whoever wrote the article have played the game, it runs about as well as Witcher 3 for me

Although the latest patch did effect performance a little.

But Wildly? Ha! Maybe when it went live.

As for this delay, eh they should finish the dx 11 support first.

 

You're the consumer every manufacturer dreams of.

 

Don't be afraid to have high standards broseph!

[Zah]

Most used? Hardly.

Yea, that title goes to the Unreal Engine.

[MrDynamicMan]

Welcome to early access. Nobody should be surprised of stuff like this anymore. It's easy to promise the world, delivering it in real time is not as easy.

MEH. Have you actually seen the shitloads of content they update? There is at least a 500mb weekly patch, often two. Two or three weeks ago they updated 3GBs in three days. In the past month they have implemented a platform system that allows built object, players, and NPC to move across all axis including pitch and roll.they have also added ~5 new dinos, on top of SOTF. They have actually surpassed expectations, in every field except optimization, which, as an alpha, is not the priority.

[MrDynamicMan]

Early access is such BS anyway just like pre ordering an excuse to do a lousy job.

There to many bad devs these day's working at big company's or even new company's, something should go horribly wrong already preferably with a big company like blizzard, so the rest finally learn not to mess with fan base.

Seey above post. Ark is an exception in terms of Early Access, the golden example. All they have failed to deliver is an update to a newer api.

Edit:yes, I am a fanboy. Yes, it still runs like shit. Yes, it needs optimizing. But their output of content is above exceptional.

[Notional]

WDDM is simply a set of rules outlined by MS that all display drivers must follow in order to achieve WHQL status. Contained within WDDM are lots of sub classes which handle how the display driver and DirectX interact with each other (things like DDI and DXGI) but its still DirectX 12 which is responsible for doing the actual work. I suppose you could call WDDM the API between the GPU and DirectX.

 

That said I suppose it is true to say that a lot of DX12s advanced features would not work without the additions made in WDDM 2.0 so I can see where he is coming from when he says that.

 

As for Vulkan, I'm really not sure if MS have added any Vulkan specific features to WDDM 2.0, what I think he is getting at is they can just piggy back off the DX12 API calls when using Vulkan to achieve similar results using a different API as both APis now operate at a bare to the metal level anyway.

Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) is the graphic driver architecture for video card drivers running Microsoft Windows versions beginning with Windows Vista.

(...)

WDDM provides the functionality required to render the desktop and applications using Desktop Window Manager, a compositing window manager running on top of Direct3D.

(...)

Windows 10 includes WDDM 2.0, which is designed to dramatically reduce workload on the kernel-mode driver for GPUs that support virtual memory addressing, to allow multithreading parallelism in the user-mode driver and result in lower CPU utilization.

Direct3D 12 API, announced at Build 2014, will require WDDM 2.0. The new API will do away with automatic resource-management and pipeline-management tasks and allow developers to take full low-level control of adapter memory and rendering states.

​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model#WDDM_2.0

 

WDDM is the graphics driver platform in Windows. If you want to call it an API, it's between Windows and the graphics drivers.  DirectX is the API between the game and WDDM.

 

With the reduced CPU overhead and introduction of multithreaded parallelism, Vulkan will be able to run better on Windows 10 than any other Windows. The only exception could be NVidia, that made multithreading possible in DX11, but they would probably have to do that specifically for Vulkan as well.

 

Most used? Hardly.

 

I said one of the most used, as it is used for all EA games, which are pretty much all AAA games. Sure if you go indie crap it's probably Unity or so, but they are less likely to use DX12 or low level Vulkan anyways.

[Master Disaster]

​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model#WDDM_2.0

WDDM is the graphics driver platform in Windows. If you want to call it an API, it's between Windows and the graphics drivers. DirectX is the API between the game and WDDM.

With the reduced CPU overhead and introduction of multithreaded parallelism, Vulkan will be able to run better on Windows 10 than any other Windows. The only exception could be NVidia, that made multithreading possible in DX11, but they would probably have to do that specifically for Vulkan as well.

I said one of the most used, as it is used for all EA games, which are pretty much all AAA games. Sure if you go indie crap it's probably Unity or so, but they are less likely to use DX12 or low level Vulkan anyways.

Still doesn't change the fact that WDDM has nothing to do with memory management at all, that is all handled by DirectX.

[Sauron]

MEH. Have you actually seen the shitloads of content they update? There is at least a 500mb weekly patch, often two. Two or three weeks ago they updated 3GBs in three days. In the past month they have implemented a platform system that allows built object, players, and NPC to move across all axis including pitch and roll.they have also added ~5 new dinos, on top of SOTF. They have actually surpassed expectations, in every field except optimization, which, as an alpha, is not the priority.

 

Optimization is never the priority until they realize it's the part that takes the most time and that gets progressively harder as they add in features. And I wasn't implying they're doing nothing, but they promised all sorts of stuff including dx12 and that was obviously more than they could chew. When people buy into early access they must be conscious that this could happen.

[Notional]

Still doesn't change the fact that WDDM has nothing to do with memory management at all, that is all handled by DirectX.

 

What do you base that on? One of the guys who co developed mantle literally says otherwise. Sorry, but you are incorrect.

[Master Disaster]

What do you base that on? One of the guys who co developed mantle literally says otherwise. Sorry, but you are incorrect.

No I'm not, there's a huge difference between kernel mode and user mode memory for a start but even then, WDDM 2 simply enables user mode memory virtualisation support, the game still has to have the DX12 API calls included to take advantage of it. By the sound of it they intend to include support in Vulkan too which is totally feasible.

Without WDDM 2 Vram virtualisation would certainly not be possible but it's not like WDDM 2 automagically means every game gets the ability to use Vram virtualisation.

Like I said, I can see his point and I'm not disagreeing with him as WDDM is a vital link in the chain and without WDDM 2 Vram virtualisation wouldn't be a thing at all but WDDM doesn't do any actual memory management.

[Notional]

Without WDDM 2 Vram virtualisation would certainly not be possible but it's not like WDDM 2 automagically means every game gets the ability to use Vram virtualisation.

 

Never claimed so. All I said was that Vulkan can benefit from Windows 10 as well due to WDDM 2.0, which is correct.

[Humbug]

Update- 3/1/2017

When responding to a tweet about linux gaming the devs have said they will roll out their Vulkan renderer this year. The game is already playable on Linux. Logically this means that the vulkan renderer is coming to windows as well. Whether work is still continuing on the DX12 renderer I am not sure. They have to decide if there is any value addition considering that DX12 means more work and will cover only a subset of the vulkan users, with Vulkan the benefits also get rolled out to win7, win8, win10 and Linux builds. Also I wonder how much work they are doing on vulkan / DX12 renderer themselves and how much is from epic on the unreal engine which they license. I understand that they have forked the engine anyway but not sure to what extent.

 

Good news for Mac players too.. Meanwhile sadly after all this time the game is still in early access. But it is a roaring success.

[patrickjp93]

Woot! The more Vulkan can replace DX the better.

[Orangeator]

1 hour ago, patrickjp93 said:

Woot! The more Vulkan can replace DX the better.

Agreed! Vulkan is vastly superior.

[AlTech]

30 minutes ago, Orangeator said:

Agreed! Vulkan is vastly superior.

The ONLY way it is superior is in multi platform support.

[Humbug]

1 hour ago, patrickjp93 said:

Woot! The more Vulkan can replace DX the better.

I hope though that the quality of their Vulkan implementation will be as good as doom. Id software did a stellar job on that... Silky smooth frame delivery.

[patrickjp93]

7 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

The ONLY way it is superior is in multi platform support.

Nope, ease of programming too, as someone who's gone through the basics of both. Khronos' documentation is ALSO superior.

[Carclis]

2 hours ago, Humbug said:

Update- 3/1/2017

When responding to a tweet about linux gaming the devs have said they will roll out their Vulkan renderer this year. The game is already playable on Linux. Logically this means that the vulkan renderer is coming to windows as well. Whether work is still continuing on the DX12 renderer I am not sure. They have to decide if there is any value addition considering that DX12 means more work and will cover only a subset of the vulkan users, with Vulkan the benefits also get rolled out to win7, win8, win10 and Linux builds. Also I wonder how much work they are doing on vulkan / DX12 renderer themselves and how much is from epic on the unreal engine which they license. I understand that they have forked the engine anyway but not sure to what extent.

 

Good news for Mac players too.. Meanwhile sadly after all this time the game is still in early access. But it is a roaring success.

So, out of early access in 2018 or is that delayed indefinitely like DX12? 

[Humbug]

1 hour ago, Carclis said:

So, out of early access in 2018 or is that delayed indefinitely like DX12? 

LOL

 

They seem to not be not focused any longer on getting out of early access...

 

but their player base doesn't seem to mind. And it allows the devs to claim that optimization is yet to be done.

[patrickjp93]

1 hour ago, Carclis said:

So, out of early access in 2018 or is that delayed indefinitely like DX12? 

When you're working at a game and game-engine level, you're working at the system level. For a 1 million+ lines of code codebase, that takes significant time regardless of the number of programmers, regardless of their caliber. I wouldn't so lightly mock them unless you're prepared to put your reputation on the line and join them in the trenches.

 

And it's not like the choice of going with the more cross-platform, open, but later-released API is a bad choice. I invite you to prove otherwise.

 

At least when I criticize the CPU-side optimization techniques of the industry as a whole I back it up with programs posted here on LTT that beat industry code by 5x at a minimum and in some cases beat it by 10x.

[Dabombinable]

1 hour ago, patrickjp93 said:

Nope, ease of programming too, as someone who's gone through the basics of both. Khronos' documentation is ALSO superior.

Shhh, you'll offend Microshaft's No1 ass-kisser.

[patrickjp93]

1 minute ago, Dabombinable said:

Shhh, you'll offend Microshaft's No1 ass-kisser.

Says the guy who gets kickbacks from calling me an Intel ass-kisser.