Godot 4.3 Dev 1 Released With Rendering System Refactor, D3D12

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Godot 4.3 Dev 1 Released With Rendering System Refactor, D3D12

Ahead of the holidays the open-source developers working on the Godot game engine have released Godot 4.3 Dev 1 as their first test release to this next feature release...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Godot-4.3-Dev-1

[Danny3]

I will never get why would anyone waste time to implement DirectX when Vulkan can ca everything that DirectX can do, even on Windows, besides being natively available on other platforms too like Linux and Android.

[sarmad]

If the engine already supports Vulkan, why would you need DX12 support in it? Does DX work better on Windows than Vulkan?

[tildearrow]

I will never get why would anyone waste time to implement DirectX when Vulkan can ca everything that DirectX can do, even on Windows, besides being natively available on other platforms too like Linux and Android.

Godot already has a Vulkan renderer.

Xbox does not do Vulkan. This will help developers who wish to port their games to that platform.

[Michael]

If the engine already supports Vulkan, why would you need DX12 support in it? Does DX work better on Windows than Vulkan?

Presumably for their Xbox console port. And for situations where D3D12 performance may be better than Vulkan drivers.

[skeevy420]

I will never get why would anyone waste time to implement DirectX when Vulkan can ca everything that DirectX can do, even on Windows, besides being natively available on other platforms too like Linux and Android.

In addition to platforms and performance, having multiple renderers per platform can help narrow down the cause of an issue if it happens with one but not others.

[arboy84]

Does the Godot Foundation sell a "Pro" version for components that are proprietary or run on proprietary systems such Xbox, PlayStation or Switch? That seems like a good way to fund the main open source part of the engine for any components that can't be open source.

[Calinou]

I will never get why would anyone waste time to implement DirectX when Vulkan can ca everything that DirectX can do, even on Windows, besides being natively available on other platforms too like Linux and Android.

Rendering via Direct3D 12 makes it possible to do things that are impossible or difficult to do with Vulkan directly, such as Auto HDR, lower input latency and native Windows on ARM support with no translation layer involved. The first two can be done via DXGI presentation (i.e. presenting Vulkan via D3D12) but we don't have this in place yet. NVIDIA does have a driver setting to automatically wrap Vulkan apps in DXGI, but AMD and Intel don't.

Some Vulkan drivers are also not as optimized as they could be, such as Intel on Windows where most of the effort is spent on Direct3D.

It's also helpful for Xbox support (either natively or with UWP). If you create your own Xbox platform port, you no longer have to write a new renderer from scratch

[rmfx]

Does the Godot Foundation sell a "Pro" version for components that are proprietary or run on proprietary systems such Xbox, PlayStation or Switch? That seems like a good way to fund the main open source part of the engine for any components that can't be open source.

Yes, the "pro with proprietary bits" version you talk about is provided by W4 Games (founded by Godot's founders).

[shmerl]

I will never get why would anyone waste time to implement DirectX when Vulkan can ca everything that DirectX can do, even on Windows, besides being natively available on other platforms too like Linux and Android.

My guess - Xbox. They aim to be an engine that competes with commercial ones. And Xbox is DX12 only becasue MS enforces lock-in there. I'd guess they do the same thing for PlayStation and Sony's lock-in APIs but in their non public add-ons.