Cyberpunk 2077 will only run with DirectX 12

[Vishera]

5 hours ago, Johners said:

CDPR could've opted to use Vulkan instead in order to give compatibility with Windows 7, 8/8.1 and even Linux (thanks Proton)

Windows 7 has DX12,in the article CDPR said that they are testing the game on Windows 7 to iron out any edge-cases that might arise.

 

5 hours ago, maartendc said:

I hear you. I never really understood why DirectX 11 stuck around for so long.

As a developer you want your games to be played by as many people as possible,so a lot of developers use DX11 since it works on Windows 7,8,8.1 and 10,

While DX12 has to be implemented specifically for Windows 7,and specifically for Windows 10 since DX12 on Windows 7 is different than the DX12 used on Windows 10 and there is no Windows 8 and 8.1 support.

 

Also in some cases DX11 performs better than DX12,and in some cases DX12 may cause problems for some people so DX11 is usually supported in DX12 titles.

An exception i have seen is games published by Microsoft,Microsoft publish their games with only the Windows 10 version of DX12 to force you into upgrading.

 

4 hours ago, RejZoR said:

The whole sticking with 15 years old OS and everyone depending on those people, sorry but screw them. Just move on with the damn times. DX12 is supported by really ancient hardware and excusing it on OS is really lame. And the fact DX12 was out for so long and everyone still makes DX9 and DX11 games even today is just absurd. Not to mention it's holding progress back.

15 year old OS?,even Vista is not that old,also Windows 7 does have DX12 and the game will work on it.

You have to understand that not every new version of Windows appeals to everyone,just like what happened with Windows 8.

 

Windows 7 is is still highly popular and the DX12 support came to it because of demand from publishers,especially from Activision-Blizzard.

It appears that large portion of Activision-Blizzard customers are Windows 7 users,and every title of theirs that use DX12 has been implemented with the Windows 7 version of DX12 as well,

A recent example for it is Call of duty Modern Warfare (the reboot).

[cj09beira]

5 hours ago, RejZoR said:

The whole sticking with 15 years old OS and everyone depending on those people, sorry but screw them. Just move on with the damn times. DX12 is supported by really ancient hardware and excusing it on OS is really lame. And the fact DX12 was out for so long and everyone still makes DX9 and DX11 games even today is just absurd. Not to mention it's holding progress back.

microsoft choose to limit dx 12 to win 10 that meant it took more time for dx12 to make sense as a primary api, add the fact that win 10 came out horrible, with less user control, telemetry, less error checking before realease, etc, and its obvious why its taking so long.

maybe if microsoft was trust worthy more people would upgrade to win 10.

the best scenario here would be people supporting vulkan since it works on all Os and is just as modern.

[Kisai]

7 hours ago, Johners said:

I don't really see why this is an issue, DirectX 12 is a modern graphics API with features only seen in Vulkan. Now, CDPR could've opted to use Vulkan instead in order to give compatibility with Windows 7, 8/8.1 and even Linux (thanks Proton) but even with that in mind, Windows 10 is the dominate OS for gamers and should be the primary target for game developers.

When you're a AAA publisher, you use the native API's, you have people who know how to use the native API's, and you don't use crappy middleware tools to wrap all the API's with one extra layer of cruft.

 

Like who knows, maybe cyberpunk 2077 pulls it off better than Unreal Engine does.

 

Single player game and multiplayer games call for two very different engine techniques, and when you deal with multiplayer you have to synchronize calls between players and there is nothing you can do when the slowest player drags everyone down.

 

Hence, you can't just develop a game to use one API and then have to wrap it for another platform, that platform will perform worse, even if that platform supports that API, you can't rely on it since it's not the vendor's API.

 

Like the thing with GPU drivers, is that you can have 40 different versions out there, and only versions after X date support vulkan, but all versions support DX12 as a requirement of Windows 10.

 

https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/faq/pa-260

Note no Vulkan support before Skylake for Intel, but there is DX12 support for Broadwell (that's 2014.)

 

https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/vulkan

AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 Series graphics (HD 7730 and up) (that's a part from 2012)

 

https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver

Kepler and later are Vulkan 1.2 capable.

 

So if you're running the iGPU on a Haswell or older system, (for some reason) there's no DX12 and no Vulkan, so SOL. Same with an nVidia card older than Kepler or an AMD card lower than HD 7730. By all accounts these are 6-8 year old hardware, and should have been retired for gaming purposes already.

[RejZoR]

@Vishera

 

Yeah, tough luck for you then. If you don't like the new OS that's not my problem. Entire world shouldn't be held back because of your pet peeves. There is a rough line between liking old stuff and progress. People still bitching about Windows 10 will never like anything anyway so having them as some sort of reasoning to hold back is silly.

I know devs want as broad reach as possible, but DX12 should really be the bottom support line at the moment. We're talking DX12 API, not DX12 functionality. Which as @Kisai mentioned goes years back in hardware. Just step up with the damn OS or just not be able to play new games. DX12 has been around for so long now holding back on some old API's just feels idiotic.

 

And honestly I don't understand people who keep bitching how Windows 7 was better. By what metric? Start menu? Just let it go already god damn. I liked Aero Glass too, but Windows 10 is far more reliable in long run as I can run it for months without major issues where Windows 7 would have to be reinstalled constantly because it just kept shitting itself for no real reason. System Restore is also far more reliable, updating of Windows is far more painless now no matter how much people bitch about it and performance was never even a question. And Start menu, now that I think of it, WinXP, WinVista and Win7 Start menu wasn't even that great at all. The Documents folders on the left in current Windows 10 gives me fast access to all my documents, music and pictures and tiles on the right of the scroll list give me far more flexible access to all the other stuff. Flexible as in speed of access. I have all the drives listed here, Programs and Games folders that I have on my second partition so I can independently clean install Windows without having to copy anything back and forth and few apps that I use regularly along with browser tile. I remember how I had things sorted in subfolders on older Windows and thinking about that the new way is just so much faster and easy to look at and figure out where is what. I admit, Windows 8 was clumsy and that charms? sidebar wasn't helping. But Windows 10 has been a good blend of Windows 7 and Windows 8 and I actually prefer it hands down. If someone asked me to go back to Windows 7 today, I probably wouldn't want to. The way Windows 10 serves me is just way better, easier to maintain and just works better in general.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

14 hours ago, RejZoR said:

The whole sticking with 15 years old OS and everyone depending on those people, sorry but screw them. Just move on with the damn times.

 

It's funny that you say that, because Ubuntu 20.4 is like a month old. Meanwhile, good ol' Windows 7 has DX12 support, so its users will be fine. 

Of course, none of this would matter if they used Vulkan instead, but I guess not everyone is ready to "move with the times"... 

14 hours ago, RejZoR said:

 

>progress 

>DirectX

 

"Progress" will be when the industry converges to the non-locked API enabling more OS-agnostic games, and when "the OS of choice for gamers" is the few offering the best performance or the best features, not the one you just use because you're locked in to. 

You know, "competition" and all that. 

 

(Btw, isn't Win 10 almost as old as Win 7 was when 10 launched? Can we start saying how bad and progress-blocking Win 10 is in 2021 or 2022? Or we'll finally admit that it's not the age, but the quality and behavior of software what should matter? I guess not, who doesn't love a "it's <current year>" argument, an I right?) 

[RejZoR]

Sticking DX12 into Windows 7 was a bizarre and frankly dumb decision. Now that corpse will rot around for even longer. Yay. Also yeah, DirectX is progress whether you like it or not. As much as I like Linux, standardization under it is a total clusterfuck and only reason Vulkan even exists is because AMD gave away their Mantle API.

[Vishera]

2 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Yeah, tough luck for you then. If you don't like the new OS that's not my problem.

How is it though luck?...

The truth is that not everybody prefer to use Windows 10,in fact there is a large number of people who dislike it,

Everyone has different needs and preferences from an OS,so it's only natural that some people won't use Windows 10,especially with a popular OS like Windows 7.

The market share of Windows 7 is huge,right now it sits at 25%,whether you like it or not people will use different OS than Windows 10,it's something you cannot prevent.

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

Sticking DX12 into Windows 7 was a bizarre and frankly dumb decision.

The only reason it happened was demand from developers,especially from Activision-Blizzard.

[Arika]

1 hour ago, Vishera said:

The market share of Windows 7 is huge,right now it sits at 25%,whether you like it or not people will use different OS than Windows 10,it's something you cannot prevent.

it's not actually as "popular" as you're trying to make it out to be, the percentage of people still using W7 that would want to play CP2077 is going to be minuscule. the super large majority of the remaining market share of windows 7 is going to be enterprise customers, businesses, schools. so basically people that either can't upgrade or would be too much of a hassle to upgrade because of legacy systems.

 

 

Everyone in this thread is making it out to be "either you play on W10 or nothing at all" completely skipping over the fact that it is being released on consoles too. If you're using an unsupported OS, it's hardly the only option you have if you refuse to use W10. not sure why this is such a big point of contention for people.

[RejZoR]

1 hour ago, Vishera said:

How is it though luck?...

The truth is that not everybody prefer to use Windows 10,in fact there is a large number of people who dislike it,

Everyone has different needs and preferences from an OS,so it's only natural that some people won't use Windows 10,especially with a popular OS like Windows 7.

The market share of Windows 7 is huge,right now it sits at 25%,whether you like it or not people will use different OS than Windows 10,it's something you cannot prevent.

The only reason it happened was demand from developers,especially from Activision-Blizzard.

Yeah, same share of people who refuse to buy new washing machine because it doesn't have a mechanical programmer anymore and they are so scared of new ones for absolutely no reason. And you start explaining it to those people and they'll cut you half way through explanation screaming "But I just don't know how to use it". Those kind of people are who refuse to just fucking move on. There is no other reason because technologically and reliability wise Windows 10 is light years ahead.

 

As for Blizzard, they are idiots that have nothing to do with Blizzard from the old days. Who would give a shit what they think or ask for?

[Dujith]

1 hour ago, Vishera said:

The market share of Windows 7 is huge,right now it sits at 25%

Isnt this because of office usage and many older machines in production environments that still use it?

(Steam June 2020 statistics)

 

Gaming wise i dont even understand why they would support Windows 7 atm. Kudos for them tho.

[Vishera]

Just now, Dujith said:

Gaming wise i dont even understand why they would support Windows 7 atm. Kudos for them tho.

Windows 7 has everything you need for a modern game to work...

DX11 and DX12

Sure there are shenanigans like what happened with Need for Speed Heat that for some reason Origin tried to block Windows 7 users from playing,

It wasn't difficult to bypass and play though.

Another case is games published by Microsoft,those are designed to not work on Windows 7 and 8.1 on purpose to force the user into upgrading.

[Dujith]

2 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Windows 7 has everything you need for a modern game to work...

DX11 and DX12

I think you misunderstood me. I mean the percentage of users gaming wise.

So while its great that they are making sure it will work on Windows 7, but it will be for a very small percentage.

Again, just talking about Cyberpunk not anyone else.

[CarlBar]

9 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Sticking DX12 into Windows 7 was a bizarre and frankly dumb decision. Now that corpse will rot around for even longer. Yay. Also yeah, DirectX is progress whether you like it or not. As much as I like Linux, standardization under it is a total clusterfuck and only reason Vulkan even exists is because AMD gave away their Mantle API.

 

Someone is apparently clueless about how DirectX used to work. DirectX didn't used to be exclusive to specific version of the Windows OS, all OS's got the latest version of DirectX as it came out. Direct X is in no way a measure of the progress of an OS because it's only exclusive to a given OS because microsoft refuses to release it on their older but still supported OS's. It's not tied in lockstep to the OS in any way.

 

 

 

That said almost anyone looking to play this that is actually using their brain cells will be on Win 10. There's not many hardware configurations with driver support for non-Win 10 Windows that will actually be fast enough to run the game. Thats the real argument in favour of this. Almost everyone who isn't running Win 10 isn't going to be able to run it even if it was DX11 compatible.

[RejZoR]

17 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

 

Someone is apparently clueless about how DirectX used to work. DirectX didn't used to be exclusive to specific version of the Windows OS, all OS's got the latest version of DirectX as it came out. Direct X is in no way a measure of the progress of an OS because it's only exclusive to a given OS because microsoft refuses to release it on their older but still supported OS's. It's not tied in lockstep to the OS in any way.

 

 

 

That said almost anyone looking to play this that is actually using their brain cells will be on Win 10. There's not many hardware configurations with driver support for non-Win 10 Windows that will actually be fast enough to run the game. Thats the real argument in favour of this. Almost everyone who isn't running Win 10 isn't going to be able to run it even if it was DX11 compatible.

Who really gives a shit how it's done now and how it was done before? It is done now the way it's done now. Either move with the times or stop bitching about it if you're stuck in the past would be my answer, really. It's literally as simple as that. They could keep it OS independent and be limited with future innovation because they'd have to make sure ancient operating systems with ancient subsystems can run it. Which is why they made it an OS thing. And which is why we're getting things like HW GPU Scheduler. So they can move things for higher efficiency in the future. Also, remember how in the old days if GPU driver crashed, entire system crashed? When was the last time a crashed GPU driver crashed entire system in Windows 10 ? It's been so long I honestly can't really remember seeing it. That's also a part of pushing things forward with the OS.

 

One thing is not liking some parts of OS and another just being stubborn and rejecting it just because you don't like even the slightest changes. In that case, i suggest people should go back to using abacus. Because even digital calculators have changed with time...

[CarlBar]

50 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Who really gives a shit how it's done now and how it was done before?

 

Anyone making a claim about how DX features are "progress" as you did cares about how it's changed as it's actually relevant to the validity of such a claim.

 

Likewise the claim that it's to avoid OS limitations is patently false, if implementing advanced features needed such tight OS integration Vulkan wouldn't be a thing, nor would various other API's that have existed alongside DX in the past. Any graphics API can be fully feature laden and OS agnostic if the developer wants it to be.Microsoft has just chosen to make it not so. Don't mistake something thats a choice for something thats a requirement.

 

As an aside, i can't say i've blu screened less with WIn 10 than Win 8, (in fact win 10 thanks to the upgrade from 8 going sideways has been my most troublesome OS in the last 7 or 8 years), and even Vista before that wasn't super bad by comparison, (worse but not exponentially so). I'll agree certain bluescreens have become less common, and i imagine for the less tech savvy that has made a major difference, for me it's just amounted to a change in cause of issues, (usually minor drivers more than the graphics ones, though tracing dow the exact culprit has actually gotten harder not easier).

[RejZoR]

And how many games uses Vulkan? Vulkan and OpenGL have always been more difficult to work with where DirectX was always more straight forward. Which is why more devs simply use DirectX. And maintaining it across quite different OS versions requires a lot more work compared to just having latest version with latest OS and that's it.

 

Also, can't get BSOD with WinXP or Win7 if update just gets stuck and never finishes. Which was a common theme on Win7...

[Kisai]

2 hours ago, CarlBar said:

 

Someone is apparently clueless about how DirectX used to work. DirectX didn't used to be exclusive to specific version of the Windows OS, all OS's got the latest version of DirectX as it came out. Direct X is in no way a measure of the progress of an OS because it's only exclusive to a given OS because microsoft refuses to release it on their older but still supported OS's. It's not tied in lockstep to the OS in any way.

 

Not quite. There are some significant changes to the video driver model between XP and Vista/7 and Vista/7's model and 8/8.1's model, and Microsoft came out with a new model for 10 called DCH. This is where the driver and the "tools" are separated so that the driver can be updated via Windows Update, and the tools updated via Windows Store.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/what-s-new-in-driver-development#windows-driver-frameworks-wdf

 

So the only thing keeping Windows 7 users from getting features are the drivers, since some features are not going to be present, even if DX12 is, as they're a part of a later version of the driver model and the OS does not support it. 

 

And yes, the reason was apparently Blizzard and their China customers, as that's where the Windows 7 gamers are concentrated.

Quote

There are, however, some limits to support. Only 64-bit Windows 7 with SP1 installed is supported. There’s no PIX or D3D12 debug layer on Windows 7, no shared surfaces or cross-API interop, no SLI/LDA support, no D3D12 video, and no WARP support. According to Microsoft, “HDR support is orthogonal to D3D12 and requires DXGI/Kernel/DWM functionalities on Windows 10 but not on Windows 7.” 

https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/297092-microsoft-makes-it-easier-to-bring-directx-12-games-to-windows-7

 

[2FA]

On 7/4/2020 at 10:29 AM, cj09beira said:

hopefully the directx to vulkan guys get dx12 to vulkan working

 

On 7/4/2020 at 12:27 AM, NZgamer said:

Yeah, it is a shame. As someone wanting to make the move to Linux, this is an extra kick in the butt. Hopefully we can get it running on Linux though through compatibility layers.

Vkd3d is the software you're looking for, it's part of WINE. The original project owner passed away last year but development has been taken over by Hans-Kristian (forked the original, does a lot of open source graphics programming), Josh (owner of d9vk which got upstreamed into dxvk), and Doitsujin (owner of dxvk). Those are primary devs but there are plenty of others as well that are part of WINE and even Valve.

[Kisai]

28 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

And how many games uses Vulkan? Vulkan and OpenGL have always been more difficult to work with where DirectX was always more straight forward. Which is why more devs simply use DirectX. And maintaining it across quite different OS versions requires a lot more work compared to just having latest version with latest OS and that's it.

 

Also, can't get BSOD with WinXP or Win7 if update just gets stuck and never finishes. Which was a common theme on Win7...

Nothing on the PC uses Vulkan proper yet (The Switch and the PS4 are capable of using Vulkan, but developers would likely opt for that hardware lower-level api's to begin with.) Some developers need to move past their own navel gazing, because tools like Unity and Godot are designed around OpenGL ES2 capabilities so they can be exported to WebGL. When they support Vulkan, any game made targeting Vulkan will not run in the browser.

 

And let's be honest, every game made as a html5 game runs like rubbish even when it does try to run in the web browser, most of these html5 games are instead shipped with a stale version of NW.JS or a Codova wrapper to use the native webview on the iphone/android device. It's been a huge cluster**** getting html5 games to work since different platforms support different image, audio and video formats, almost as a giant f***-you to developers. And then there's WASM which just makes you wonder why not just ship a native app and forget trying to run through a dozen translation laters.

 

Vulkan is hard to use. You pretty much are writing the graphics driver yourself, and the native "vulkan" is 3D with no 2D at all, so if all you want to do is some flat-UI stuff, you have to just as much work as rendering a fully textured 3d scene. For 3D games this is a godsend of sorts because they don't need to fight the OS or the graphics driver for control, but it also means that you can't throw caution into the wind like you do in C++ normally. The GPU does not do error checking, it can not. If you screw up, you better be familiar with how that screw up looks. You can't leak memory, because the vulkan layer will just keep allocating memory, even start using system memory or page file memory if you don't explicitly do reference counting when you allocate and deallocate memory. There is no "let it run out of scope" aspects.

 

Memory management is the second hardest thing to do properly in a game, the first being threading. Since Vulkan gives you fine-grain control over both of these with the GPU, you better know what you're doing.

 

DirectX12 has a slightly larger safety net only by virtue of doing things the way the OS wants you to do them, but it's still pretty much at the same level as Vulkan.

 

Middleware (eg Unity, Unreal, and so forth) however tends to support Vulkan as a "render target" rather than a "vulkan native" type of solution, which means that under the hood it's doing it's own memory and thread management and probably isn't going to be as fast as developing something directly on top of the Vulkan API. 

 

If you want a fantastic example of how good/bad the various PC/Mac API's actually work, compile https://github.com/ocornut/imgui and run each version. You'll notice there is essentially no input latency on DX12 and Vulkan, but there is for most other's, some worse than others. 

[Vishera]

6 hours ago, CarlBar said:

There's not many hardware configurations with driver support for non-Win 10 Windows that will actually be fast enough to run the game. Thats the real argument in favour of this. Almost everyone who isn't running Win 10 isn't going to be able to run it even if it was DX11 compatible.

Each and every component of my systems has an excellent driver support for Windows 7...

AMD stopped driver support for Windows 7 with X570,Intel stopped with Z390,but it doesn't stop you from running Windows 7 on the machine...

Windows 7 enjoys GPU driver support that is as good as Windows 10,same with peripherals and all kinds of devices.

Overclockers prefer to use Windows 7 in many workloads since in those workloads Windows 7 is faster than 10 (usually CPU benchmarks)

[cj09beira]

4 hours ago, RejZoR said:

And how many games uses Vulkan? Vulkan and OpenGL have always been more difficult to work with where DirectX was always more straight forward. Which is why more devs simply use DirectX. And maintaining it across quite different OS versions requires a lot more work compared to just having latest version with latest OS and that's it.

 

Also, can't get BSOD with WinXP or Win7 if update just gets stuck and never finishes. Which was a common theme on Win7...

vulkan is actually simpler than dx12

[cj09beira]

22 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Each and every component of my systems has an excellent driver support for Windows 7...

AMD stopped driver support for Windows 7 with X570,Intel stopped with Z390,but it doesn't stop you from running Windows 7 on the machine...

Windows 7 enjoys GPU driver support that is as good as Windows 10,same with peripherals and all kinds of devices.

Overclockers prefer to use Windows 7 in many workloads since in those workloads Windows 7 is faster than 10 (usually CPU benchmarks)

ya those telemetry threads use cpu cycles  (used to do some overclocking myself on hwbot)

[Vishera]

24 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

ya those telemetry threads use cpu cycles  (used to do some overclocking myself on hwbot)

HWBOT is awesome,I am currently in a battle to achieve the fastest GTX 1660,seems like you need more than 1 GHz overclock to the memory to get first place 

First place has 1.2GHz overclock to the memory (the 1660 is heavily bottlenecked by the memory).

[CarlBar]

1 hour ago, Vishera said:

Each and every component of my systems has an excellent driver support for Windows 7...

AMD stopped driver support for Windows 7 with X570,Intel stopped with Z390,but it doesn't stop you from running Windows 7 on the machine...

Windows 7 enjoys GPU driver support that is as good as Windows 10,same with peripherals and all kinds of devices.

Overclockers prefer to use Windows 7 in many workloads since in those workloads Windows 7 is faster than 10 (usually CPU benchmarks)

 

Not having motherboard drivers might not completely stop you using it, but it's going to severely hamper you as you have reduced features, security and stability, (The latter being the only one OC cares about but it's rarely an issue in the super limited environments of OC'ing and having all those extra features not working is to their advantage). If Motherboard drivers weren't doing anything they wouldn't exist. 

[Vishera]

Just now, CarlBar said:

 

Not having motherboard drivers might not completely stop you using it, but it's going to severely hamper you as you have reduced features, security and stability, (The latter being the only one OC cares about but it's rarely an issue in the super limited environments of OC'ing and having all those extra features not working is to their advantage). If Motherboard drivers weren't doing anything they wouldn't exist. 

True,stability should not be an issue though.