Friday, April 29th 2016

Hitman Episode Two Update Breaks DirectX 12 Support

The latest update for the episodic "Hitman" game (version 1.1.2) breaks support for DirectX 12 on the PC platform. Released earlier this week, the update introduces players to the second episode based in the Medeterranean setting of Sapienza. We found that after the update, the game simply refused to start. We took advantage of the external settings tool to do some trial-and-error work.

The topmost setting, which lets you select between DirectX 12 (our original setting) and DirectX 11, fixed the issue, when we switched to the latter. We even swapped graphics cards between GeForce GTX 970 SLI (our original setup), GTX 970 single-card (NVIDIA driver 364.96), and Radeon R9 290 (AMD driver 16.4.2). Neither setups worked. A stroll through the Internet reveals that multiple other players are facing this issue. Has Square Enix done absolutely no play-testing in DirectX 12?
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28 Comments on Hitman Episode Two Update Breaks DirectX 12 Support

#26
BiggieShady
the54thvoidThat flies with what I've read about it. You just can't think DX12 is so easy to use that you don't have to bother trying. It still has rules and even the almighty Async comes with guidelines on how to implement it. If it's done with minimal queuing it wont negatively affect Nvidia. If it's balls out Async (AoS) then it will hamper Nvidia.

Again, shoe is on the other foot now and I don't hear people crying foul about AMD GE titles ramping up Async.

However, going forward, if Pascal isn't good enough with Async and AAA's start using it more (thinking Deus Ex) then my next card may well be Vega.

Still too early to tell though. Allwe are seeing is immature implementation of DX12 in quite a lot of titles.
From what I have read, it's all about what happens in a single frame of a game. Best case for nvidia is to batch draw calls and then separately batch async compute commands ... you get parallelism in both separately (but not mixed). Coincidentally that is the worst case scenario for amd. GCN gets best effectiveness if 3D and async compute commands are mixed in the same queue.
Looking at the net result on the level of a whole frame, if done optimally for each architecture, effectiveness should be comparable for both arch. but GCN is certainly easier to code for in this case.
So the issue will be with direct ports from consoles ... as usual, but for nvidia only this time.
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#27
corsaro
First image looks whose then Far Cry 2004!
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#28
Prima.Vera
corsaroFirst image looks whose then Far Cry 2004!
Still THE BEST FarCry to date, miles away from the junk relesed after. Wish the make a real sequel to that...
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