Star Citizen developers intend to drop DirectX support and only support Vulkan
<i>"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. As a result our current intention is to only support Vulkan and eventually drop support for DX11 as this shouldn'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'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."</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'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 -> 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'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?