When will we finally be rid of dx9?

My two one off posts aside, I feel as though it is time to actually contribute to this thread.

I have to cast my vote for keeping support for DirectX 9 until UT can produce figures showing the cost of upkeep hindering the further advancement of Unity.

For the majority of my projects within Unity would have a GeForce FX 5600 scoffing at the fidelity of my work, and this is done with purpose. My target audience are those who have picked up either Dell or Walmart special PCs years ago, and have no reason to upgrade as the entirety of their computer usage hardly exceeds web based applications and games akin to those prepackaged on their systems from Wild Tangent or the likes.

Don't read too far into this and say I am against the push towards DirectX 11 and other further advancements, but once Unity 4 reached its end of life, given Unity 5 dropped DirectX 9 support, I would be tied to an outdated version no longer receiving bug fixes or be forced to move to another engine or even having to write my own.

I have yet to see any real figures or evidence that truely promotes the discontinuation of DirectX 9 support, and until they do I will take a hard stand against UT prematurely dropping support for that architecture.

 

I don't think there's any fear of that.

 

Exactly.

Main dev box: Win 8.1, 6 mos old.
Old and still plenty usable box: Win XP, newer gpu, 8 or 9 years old. Primarily gaming, some dev.

 

Yeah you're right, it's DirectX 10 on my laptop. I know DX11 cards are cheap, putting two Gefore GTX 770's in my new desktop. ^^

No need to apologise, the internet has no way to put emotion into text. Even if people are harsh to me it makes no difference to me. But yeah very useful link.

Yeah I've always thought that Unity needed an OpenGL option, not sure if that would be a huge pain in the ass though.

 

Unity has always had an OpenGL option. http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/CommandLineArguments.html

--Eric

 

graphics are worthless... GAMEPLAY!!
... gta 5 sucks... (seriously, game was a total letdown, they obviously spent 60% or more effort into graphics than gameplay, its a nice looking city, but nothing to do in it.. and the least missions of any gta game)

... i was still using windows XP (which cant use dx10 + ) until April 2013 ... because, i was soo used to XP, i didnt want to switch.. and i only switched cause i got a new PC that had windows 8 on it.. and I got programs for win8 that make it feel more like windowsXP lol

 

Don't talk nonsense, people will judge you by it.

 

It doesn't make the statistics very useful if we do not get the full picture. People can come up with statistics to prove anything, if the sample size is small or obscure enough.

 

To the contrary, statistics and "prove" anything.

 

End of the day it comes down to what YOU'RE trying to achieve and what that allows you to get away with. No point in limiting your user base if your game doesn't require such feature sets as tessellation etc.

The better your game looks (or more features) the more people you're going to cut out of your target market. One point is with DX12 there are a lot of optimisations, so personally I'm very tempted to make use of it.

@angrypenguin

The games I listed with specs have already been released, although I believe it'll be the general consensus for min specs in years to come. I just hope developers aren't continuing to be over optimistic with these base specs..