Originally posted by microcode
View Post
In most cases we found the D3D12 backend to be faster. It was faster because it did some threading tricks that the Vulkan backend currently doesn't do. However, that performance advantage slims significantly on higher end systems.
The D3D12 backend showed the most benefit for Intel iGPU users that could support D3D12, but not Vulkan. This was a lot of users. Intel iGPUs dominate our top GPUs used stat in analytics.
While it's unfortunate, we chose to keep the code base easier to maintain, and dropping D3D12 let us do just that. This was the biggest reason. Due to needing a very specific version of the Win10 SDK, retargeting the project to a new version every time the SDK updated wasn't feasible. As it requires buildbot admin coordination as well. And since we have no idea how microsoft intends to manage the Win10 SDK with VS 2017 which we recently migrated to, if microsoft chooses to constantly update it, that's a huge headache for us.
Additionally, the maintainer of the D3D12 backend pretty much disappeared after getting it merged to master, and due to the questionable quality of the code, none of the regular graphics devs wanted to touch it. It fell out of feature parity and users were frustrated that nobody was fixing anything in that backend.
Leave a comment: