Star Citizen May Drop DirectX In Favor Of Vulkan
Cloud Imperium Games, the studio behind Star Citizen, announced that they are considering parting ways with DirectX completely in favor of Vulkan. The graphics API would make Star Citizen compatible with Windows 7,8, and 10, with the possibility of making the game playable on Linux computers. Whereas DirectX requires players to be running Windows 10.
“Years ago we stated our intention to support [DirectX 12], 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,” said director of graphics engineering Ali Brown in a forum post Q&A. “As a result our current intention is to only support Vulkan and eventually drop support for [DirectX 11] as this shouldn't effect any of our backers.” -GamaSutra
For now, the team may use DirectX12, but it's far off in the uncertain future.
Star Citizen would not be the first game to use the Vulkan. Dota 2, Doom, and The Witness already support the API.
Not too long ago Star Citizen announced the switch to Amazon's Lumberyard game engine, abandoning Crytek's CRYENGINE, and becoming the first big name-recognition title under the Amazon Lumberyard header.
