Directx 12 was just announced, what will Unity do with this?

http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/5/5475392/directx-12-windows-microsoft-gdc-2014

I doubt anything for awhile, but what would everyone like to see and how interested are you in this? Especially considering Unity recently added Directx 11 support/

 

Nothing for the next 5 years or so.

 

I don't really care actually. Its not like suddenly your game will get 100x better and your graphics will boost. Simply there will be more useless features and slightly better rendering. I also predict it will have a lot of bugs (known for Microsoft's recent years of releasing buggy software). Just wait for like 3 years until its stable and I will actually care

@Grimwolf exactly! No one will have the hardware. On top of that, it will most likely be a Windows 8 exclusive. Just like how dx 11.2 is. After a few years there will be meaning to this but for now, it's useless

 

I have no plans to develop anything focused on either PC or XBox, so it means nothing to me.
Even if I did, and if the buggyness of it didn't matter to me, and Unity were to jump on supporting it, there would still be the issue of only like 0.001% of gamers having the hardware to actually utilize it.

 

Dont expect Unity to have this any time soon. I'd expect Direct X 12 in Unity as soon as Direct X 12 becomes common in games, which I cant see happening soon, at least a year if not longer (current gen consoles just got released, devs are going to be struggling to target that spec let alone this crazy new hardware).

 

Bugs are quite often released in Microsoft products, I faced a lot of trouble and crashing with windows 8.

 

It will probably be Windows 8 exclusive since they're still desperately trying to force people to buy it. That means the only devs who would ever use it are those who want to make a high-end PC Windows-store exclusive game, which as far as I know is nobody.

 

I'd be far more interested in an OpenGL 4.1 upgrade .

You guys must of played around with this concept already, sure there's a lot of deprecated commands that if you stick an i or something weird on the end suddenly removed the deprecation? (Way to go ARB, point being a lot of them aren't quite deprecated, just annoyingly slightly modified ) Overall with Apples support it shouldn't be that difficult. Even if you use GL as an extension module wrapper and leave in the gubbins from the old GL as you transition. It's not difficult to have some backwards compatibility..

 

Read this...

http://www.i-programmer.info/news/144-graphics-and-games/5744-amd-no-directx-12.html

 

I'd like to see dx11-like support for mac's before seeing dx12 for windows. Compute shaders/geometry shaders etc.

 

what will they do with a news announcement?

read it maybe.

 

Read a year old article taken out of context and apply it to a modern day announcement that contradicts it with no rebuttal source from the interviewed person or updated company's stand?

Okay.

 

some details about DirectX 12 (Microsoft's response to AMD Mantle / very exciting)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/directx/p/directx12.aspx

http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/03/20/directx-12/

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/...ovements-for-existing-hardware-in-directx-12/

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/1...rectx-12-will-imitate-and-destroy-amds-mantle

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-dx12-directx-12,26360.html

http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/20/5530134/microsoft-directx-12-windows-pc-xbox-one-windows-phone

 

I think it's a lot more appealing than previous DX releases (not that I don't like tesselation etc), as it's mostly about performance, and not about leaving another generation of users behind.

 

Q: When will I be able to get my hands on DirectX 12?
A: We are targeting Holiday 2015 games.

 

i agree nvidia saying they will add dx12 support to all exists dx11 cards and hopefully amd will follow...

 

Considering the first release of DX 11 was October 2009, I really think recently is a good description.

 

NVIDIA will support the DX12 API on all the DX11-class GPUs it has shipped. Over 70% of gaming PCs are now DX11 based.

Source: http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/03/20/directx-12/

It will probably take 3 years for Unity to support it though. That is how long it took them to support dx11. And considering the Unity release cycle is about 1.5 or 2 years, I wouldn't place my bets on it until Unity 6 comes out.

 

Wow wasn't aware that DX 12 is almost upon us. 50% more CPU efficiency? I am a little skeptical if it's that wonderful it sounds almost too good to be true. I am wondering exactly what is more optimized. Need to read more info. Only had time to read one of the links posted

[edit] Oh I see at the bottom of the article they explain why it's faster.

 

I think it's time for the community to stop feeling defeatist about Unity. All you really do is drag staff morale down. A lot of the features that make it in are dependent on developer passion too. If a developer feels everyone is rooting for his work, he is more likely to burn a couple of weekend nights on it or do a few hours extra.

Developers are human, Unity staff is human. You can make a difference showing support and enthusiasm. I think they'd like that a lot, and you might just be surprised.

 

Would you like me to arrange a room for you and a very lucky Unity developer?


By the way guys, I will be upgrading my Unity Pro license; keep up the impressive work!

 

I don't think there's much rush to bring in DX12 anyway, at least, not until we can see any practical applications for it. The lack of OpenGL 4 in Unity is a far more significant issue, as it means that we don't have access to geometry shaders, tessellation, or compute on anything but Microsoft platforms.

 

They are also a bunch big boys and girls and have to learn to take criticism and ribbing. The world is not at all roses and puppy dogs, and if they cant handle a bunch of forum fools ripping into them or pooping on their ego, then perhaps they need to go back to mommy and daddy for comfort.

Everyone here likes Unity, and even the ones giving them a hard time still care, because if they didnt care they simply would have left and said "kthnxbye" and never looked back. But obviously there are many who still want Unity to pull ahead.

Personally, I like Unity. I especially like the old UT, the ones working for the little guy, the ones sticking it to the man, the one where David (and all the devs) came onto the forum to tell us of all the great and cool things they have planned, and listening to what we like and dont like about Unity and worked really hard to bring it to us. What I dont like is the new "corporate UT" .... the one with money and investors as its primary goal, and the little guy second, the one where you barely see any of the UT team interact with the people, except to do some sort of damage control, or rare blue moon.

 

Unity will stop caring about DX and focus on OpenGL - like most smart people are doing these days.

 

Aye, indeed.

I also think (and not just because of recent developments from competition *cough*), that UT will have to come here and mingle more often. Talk to us guys, we're all super excited about your product and we eager to hear anything you might have to say, even if it is a simple rant about some implementation gone bad.

Let's talk about achievements, cool things, but also about bugs, future plans and what keeps you going. We don't need dates and commitments set in stone, alone hearing about what you might be working on next, what features you're trying to squeeze in would be really fantastic.

 

you meant to say OpenCL right? and that is just a load of crap... otherwise your sarcasm has trumped my radar detector.

 

Unity will get 1st rate support on DX12 from Microsoft and openGL will be the struggler. Microsoft knows to stay in government and big business offices that have to secure employee work machines. They are saved by Apple gross overcharging, a small Apple, Unix, Linux work pool and not really being more secure than MS offerings anyway. Otherwise, you'll see a lot of government sites going off the net - many of which should never have been on the net to begin with.

It's time to realize that 'professional', 'indy', and 'hobby' gamer programmers are interesting to these companies only in that it creates a pool of knowledgeable users for government, educational, and big businesses. That's a 'sustainable' business model - everything else is faddish, especially games. And it's getting to the point where computer science college and university programming or education isn't even needed in using Unity or other gaming engines - the more relevant degrees to have when you are using a tool such as Unity are biology and ecology and less so mathematics and physics (because the engine already handles the most difficult parts of those).

I would discourage Unity and IT workers from spending all they thing cranking out code eventually all that time in front of the desk will make them lethargic and unproductive. System Administrators - well you are in another boat - you should demand that management create redundant workstations and servers so you can keep sane working hours and have a life.

 

Actually I totally adore Unity, in fact, I have a Pro license and just bought the next one for the sole purpose of supporting the developers. I don't need pro, as I am just playing around with it but I think it is such a cool piece of tech that I want to support its development. However, I do think a healthy dose of sarcasm about some pressing issues like keeping up with new developments won't hurt.

 

My biggest concern here is threading.
Given the nature of my code (voxel engine code) I would seriously benefit from being able to talk to the unity API on secondary threads even if it was only limited, and this is what DX12 is great for.

I use unity with Visual Studio and my game logic is heavily threaded and as a result I have to spend hours dropping stuff out to the console instead of properly debugging because the tooling just isn't that well connected.
If I could I would get a unity VS extension that resulted in unity being part of VS as that's where I prefer to be at all times.

Part of this is issue the unity compiler (from what I understand) which is supposedly being completely re-thought in unity5 then there's unityVS which in my opinion isn't all that great but it's not a unity delivered product (so we can't blame the unity team for that now can we), the key to this getting fixed should now lay with Microsoft as they just bought Syntax Tree (the developers on UnityVS).
The built in Monodevelop IMO is just as bad and doesn't feel as polished as VS, its buggy as hell and crashes all the time but this may at least in part be due to those compiler issues in the unity code.

When the various pieces are brought together I don't think getting DX12 in to unity is that hard a push since most of the functionality is in DX11 the new 12 API is just essentially 11 + a low level API for direct GPU control when you think about it.

The bigger issue of course is that Unity also sits on OpenGL which won't even come close to this type of behaviour for a long time yet and unity has always made clear its intentions to support / work with both in order to be cross platform compatible.

 

They'll be a few years yeah, U6 most likely.

 

I hope nothing and never. Microsoft and Khronos (OpenGL) should stop pushing out API's and instead focus their vendors on removing bugs from the current API implementations.

 

That won't happen. No company would write a contract that forces them to do bug free drivers for consumer hardware that can be bought from local shop.

 

I would imagine they will implement it fairly fast, saying MS will be pushing it on all platforms(Xbox one, windows 9 RT and Windows 9) most likely and Unity has a large partnership with them as well.

 

Considering it took forever for them to implement DX11, and the fact that it'll take ages to bug fix and such, earliest would be late in the U5.x cycle.

 

Unity took forever because of their rigid view on "parity" which I do admit is frustrating sometimes, but if MS say DX 12 is required for something like tablets like they did for DX 11 then it will be a different story. But it would be late 5.x anyways just because the first wave of games using it won't launch until late 2015.

 

I'm here sitting thinking where the hell I've been that I'm barely finding out about Dx 12 being released...

 

I don't think they need to force them to do anything. Just more stringent conformance tests. What good is it for consortium groups to keep pushing new standards that teams of thousands of skilled engineers can't make their products comply entirely to?