Unity Game Engine to ditch support for DirectX9

[King_of_Oz]

Article:

 

https://blogs.unity3d.com/2017/07/10/deprecating-directx-9/?_ga=2.107508290.171506102.1499698219-2136470892.1493721966

 

Quote

Due to diminishing hardware numbers and the loss of platform support from Microsoft, we have come to the conclusion that continued support of the DirectX 9 API is no longer feasible and is working against us when it comes to developing new features in Unity. It has become increasingly difficult to support and maintain feature parity across several DirectX API versions (9, 11, and 12). 

With the rise of new graphics APIs, we feel that Unity continues to have excellent coverage of the hardware and API choices available now and in the future.

Rip DX9. Any thoughts?

 

@LinusTech  potential wan show topic?

 

For those of you that don't know, unity is the worlds most widely used video game Engine.

[Zando_]

Is that bad?

[King_of_Oz]

Just now, Zando Bob said:

Is that bad?

It just means that 90% of new games/updates made with unity will not function on DX9 machines. I just thought it sorta signified the death of DX9.

[Tiz]

Wait, what? Unity dropping support DX9? I mean... I'd surprised if Unreal do that, but it'd more or less acceptable, but Unity? Isn't Unity supposed to be more resource friendly? At least that was the point the last time I worked with it...

[DXMember]

2 minutes ago, King_of_Oz said:

It just means that 90% of new games/updates made with unity will not function on DX9 machines. I just thought it sorta signified the death of DX9.

as long as things like Fallout 4 and Skyrim keep releasing we will never be rid of that plague

[DXMember]

1 minute ago, Tiz said:

Wait, what? Unity dropping support DX9? I mean... I'd surprised if Unreal do that, but it'd more or less acceptable, but Unity? Isn't Unity supposed to be more resource friendly? At least that was the point the last time I worked with it...

DX9 doesn't mean resource friendly

[Tiz]

1 minute ago, DXMember said:

DX9 doesn't mean resource friendly

Um... yes it does, less features and (mostly) less things in the pipeline. The shaders available with DX11 are insane for old computers and laptops, no idea where you get DX9 is not more resource friendly...

[Zando_]

8 minutes ago, King_of_Oz said:

It just means that 90% of new games/updates made with unity will not function on DX9 machines. I just thought it sorta signified the death of DX9.

Hmmm. But don't most newer gaming PCs support DX11 and 12? 

[Mister_Cro_Noob]

13 minutes ago, King_of_Oz said:

Article:

 

https://blogs.unity3d.com/2017/07/10/deprecating-directx-9/?_ga=2.107508290.171506102.1499698219-2136470892.1493721966

 

Rip DX9. Any thoughts?

 

@LinusTech  potential wan show topic?

 

For those of you that don't know, unity is the worlds most widely used video game Engine.

This is gonna take a huge impact on devs. Especially on the Unturned dev

[yian88]

What are you crazy? this a good thing OP, the faster they get rid of garbage in the API, i would actually do a lightning quick work and remove all old dx9/10, < opengl ~4.0 and so on from the engine, im glad they will do this for dx9 at least by 2017.3 version, currently im developing on 2017.2 beta so thats not too far ahead go UT make my dev life easier.

 

You can get insanely low priced DX11+ gpu's second hand nowdays, just look i bought a used 970 150$, sold my oldt 670 for 90$, and you can get a gtx 470/570+ / hd 5800 series+ for small $ and still run many non demanding games just fine.

 

I hope they will start removing it fast and improve performance and engine features, currently when i run test DX12 vs DX11 is stupidly slow, vulkan slightly better than DX 12 in unity but still far behind dx11, i hope this means more and more advanced techniques in unity,features and performance improvements.

 

[Tiz]

1 minute ago, Zando Bob said:

Hmmm. But don't most newer gaming PCs support DX11 and 12? 

Yep http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

 

In fact, seems ilke there's more people with DX8 than DX9...

[Mister_Cro_Noob]

1 minute ago, yian88 said:

What are you crazy? this a good thing OP, the faster they get rid of garbage in the API,

And give a huge hit on games that run on Windows XP or Vista with DirectX API.   (Yes there are still some people that use XP ffs)

[yian88]

1 minute ago, Tiz said:

Yep http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

 

In fact, seems ilke there's more people with DX8 than DX9...

Please people stop using steam hw survery its innacurate by a large margin.

The game industry does not make money by selling old dx8 2D games ok?

dx8 and 9 and anything opengl <4.0 is shit get rid of it

[yian88]

1 minute ago, Mister_Cro_Noob said:

And give a huge hit on games that run on Windows XP or Vista with DirectX API.   (Yes there are still some people that use XP ffs)

people who use XP are mentally ill in short

and dev's should absolutely never give support to such people using such old machines, i switched to vista then 7 a decade ago, i wasnt rich or anything, and people still talk about XP

[Mister_Cro_Noob]

Just now, yian88 said:

people who use XP are mentally ill in short

and dev's should absolutely never give support to such people using such old machines, i switched to vista then 7 a decade ago, i wasnt rich or anything, and people still talk about XP

No they are not. They are smart cause they don't give data to Microsoft and have some respect to that people ffs.

[DXMember]

2 minutes ago, Mister_Cro_Noob said:

No they are not. They are smart cause they don't give data to Microsoft and have some respect to that people ffs.

it's businesses using old epson printers and VMs that use XP, there's very little to none household machines running on XP

[Tiz]

8 minutes ago, yian88 said:

Please people stop using steam hw survery its innacurate by a large margin.

The game industry does not make money by selling old dx8 2D games ok?

dx8 and 9 and anything opengl <4.0 is shit get rid of it

Don't know why steam survey is "inaccurate by a large margin", care to explain or give a source?

6 minutes ago, yian88 said:

people who use XP are mentally ill in short

and dev's should absolutely never give support to such people using such old machines, i switched to vista then 7 a decade ago, i wasnt rich or anything, and people still talk about XP

My own mother still plays with her old PC, she is casual as hell but still I'm proud of her for playing games other than just Candy Crush in mobile.

You should relax a bit buddy, that's not a healthy attitude towards developing a game, and I don't think is gonna benefit your game.

I myself am developing with UE4 only for DX11 or superior, so is not like I depend on DX9... but still, I'd never say things like you said.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, Zando Bob said:

Hmmm. But don't most newer gaming PCs support DX11 and 12? 

yep. Looking on the steam hardware surbey, there are only 2.3% of gamers with a gpu that can't run dx10 or newer and only about 3% of gamers can't use dx10 or newer at all(due to gpu or windows xp not support anything newer than dx 9). Id aruge this isn't a problem.

[King_of_Oz]

19 hours ago, DXMember said:

it's businesses using old epson printers and VMs that use XP, there's very little to none household machines running on XP

The entire medical industry in Canada uses XP/Vista.

[Guest]

22 hours ago, yian88 said:

snip

If my dad didn't take my desktop to work a number of years ago, I'd still be using windows XP. I had no reason to upgrade whatsoever. Enough games I played worked on windows XP, and games were still coming out for it. 

 

How can steam surveys be off by a large margin when they have monthly reports? 

 

Another huge thing to note is economic states of the world. I am glad I live in a cash flowing 1st world country, however for many individuals in socialist and underdeveloped/wartorn countries there is less money. Not everyone needs, wants, or can even afford to upgrade every 10 years. 

 

A lot of my friends on steam have 10~ games or less. Most of my steam friends also don't have good gaming PCs. A lot have laptops meant for school work. If they have this older hardware and older operating systems they'll need the games to work on their system otherwise they won't buy it. Hence why consoles are so popular. 

 

The argument saying these these people have bad computers and no games means they shouldn't be catered to for new games is a

foolish argument in my opinion as a few of these individuals may put more money into the DLC and monetization. Another important detail is there's a lot of them. Having games with support for what people have can mean a lot of money. 

 

I had had more arguments however I couldn't find sources. 

 

[DXMember]

4 hours ago, King_of_Oz said:

The entire medical industry in Canada uses XP/Vista.

okay,

are you enumerating examples to my statement?

[DXMember]

2 hours ago, fpo said:

Another huge thing to note is economic states of the world. I am glad I live in a cash flowing 1st world country, however for many individuals in socialist and underdeveloped/wartorn countries there is less money. Not everyone needs, wants, or can even afford to upgrade every 10 years. 

 

A lot of my friends on steam have 10~ games or less. Most of my steam friends also don't have good gaming PCs. A lot have laptops meant for school work. If they have this older hardware and older operating systems they'll need the games to work on their system otherwise they won't buy it. Hence why consoles are so popular. 

Maybe it's just a coincidence, but I believe that people that have higher priorities than having a modern gaming computer might also have higher priorities than playing the latest games

 

Apart from again Skyrim and Fallout 4, there are no games coming out for X Box, PS2, PS3, X Box 360 either.

 

Windows XP is end of life for more than 3 years.

DirectX 10 has been released more than 10 years ago, DirectX 11 isn't too far from being 10 years old either, hardware supporting both is even older than that.

As someone already stated - do you think we should keep support for DirectX 8 and older as well?

That's when you end up with x86 architecture and power consumption

[Guest]

7 hours ago, DXMember said:

Maybe it's just a coincidence, but I believe that people that have higher priorities than having a modern gaming computer might also have higher priorities than playing the latest games

 

Apart from again Skyrim and Fallout 4, there are no games coming out for X Box, PS2, PS3, X Box 360 either.

 

Windows XP is end of life for more than 3 years.

DirectX 10 has been released more than 10 years ago, DirectX 11 isn't too far from being 10 years old either, hardware supporting both is even older than that.

As someone already stated - do you think we should keep support for DirectX 8 and older as well?

That's when you end up with x86 architecture and power consumption

Actually, you make a strong point. 

I personally feel limited with 32 bit applications when 64 bit has been out since... a really long time. 

 

Games like Arma 3 came put at 32 bits so they could only use 8gb of ram total as per x86 limitation, and if I understand properly, a lot of the 32 bit mods will hamper 64 bit gameplay and stability for the duration of Arma 3's life. 

 

As you said, the same goes for directX and graphics API, however much less I understand it and how performance is affected. 

 

I tried justifying support for older systems and it was hard however I refused to believe that Windows XP and older systems are obsolete (in a way) 

 

i guess im having trouble accepting my super powerful GPU that was 400 dollars will be unable to play games in 5-9 years. 

 

EDIT:

PS

if I still had that XP system I would likely still only be playing Dawn of war D.C., and fallout New Vegas. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

Well, here's my thoughts:

• It can be increasingly harder, if not technically impossible, to keep feature parity across DX9 and DX11. Especially with DX9's shortcomings. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Level_Shading_Language#Shader_model_comparison
• If you want to stick with DX9, nobody's stopping you from only using the last supported version of Unity.
• Older OSes not only have a smaller user base, but the people who both use Unity and the older OS is shrinking to the point where it's uneconomical to pay your engineers to continue supporting it. If you want the company to support it, either you can find a super critical bug or pay them a lot of money.
• You can use OpenGL as an alternative as Unity has said.
• In some cases, backwards compatibility support can be frustrating. Did you know there was something required on Intel systems until 2009 or so to support, in hindsight, a stupid software development practice that was done in 1981?