Star Citizen to Ditch DX11 and Add Vulkan Support

Space exploration MMO Star Citizen is set to drop support for DirectX 11 and instead focus its support for the Vulkan API, rather than adopt DirectX 12. The game’s developer, Cloud Imperium, has revealed that it intends to support only Vulkan, rather than DirectX 12, so as to not force its users to upgrade to Windows 10 in order to play the game. Unlike DirectX 12, Vulkan is supported by Windows 7, 8, and 10, plus Linux, and runs great on both NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards, unlike OpenGL.

The move is a change in strategy for Cloud Imperium, which long ago stated that it would add DX12 support for Star Citizen. However, Vulkan’s wild success seems to have changed the company’s mind.

“Years ago we stated our intention to support DX12, but since the introduction of Vulkan which has the same feature set and performance advantages this seemed a much more logical rendering API to use as it doesn’t force our users to upgrade to Windows 10 and opens the door for a single graphics API that could be used on all Windows 7, 8, 10 & Linux,” Cloud Imperium’s Alistair Brown said on the Roberts Space Industries forum. “As a result our current intention is to only support Vulkan and eventually drop support for DX11 as this shouldn’t effect [sic] any of our backers. DX12 would only be considered if we found it gave us a specific and substantial advantage over Vulkan. The API’s really aren’t that different though, 95% of the work for these APIs is to change the paradigm of the rendering pipeline, which is the same for both APIs.”

Star Citizen is still in pre-release Alpha and is expected to get a full commercial release at some point this year.