Star Citizen developers intend to drop DirectX support and only support Vulkan
<i>&quot;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&#x27;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 &amp; Linux. As a result our current intention is to only support Vulkan and eventually drop support for DX11 as this shouldn&#x27;t effect any of our backers. DX12 would only be considered if we found it gave us a specific and substantial advantage over Vulkan. The API&#x27;s really aren&#x27;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.&quot;</i><p>This feels like a pretty handwavey statement. For one, all shaders would need to be converted from HLSL to GLSL, which could become quite a big task depending on the amount of shaders, and testing of all changes.<p>Secondly as I understand it the Vulkan API is much more low level and barebones than DirectX, meaning it&#x27;ll be a lot of work to shore up the differences. I may be wrong here, but it seems to be like the developer is saying that a DirectX -&gt; OpenGL change is no big deal, but swapping out your foundations <i>is</i> a major big deal. The concepts may be the same but the APIs are still hugely different.<p>And why is this even a concern for a game started in 2011? It&#x27;s mind boggling that they are making these kind of decisions 6 years into development, surely just finishing the damn gameplay should be the focus?