Wednesday, July 1st 2020
Cyberpunk 2077 a DX12-Only Release on PC
Marcin Gollent, Lead Graphics Programmer at CD Projekt RED revealed in an interview with PC Games Hardware that cyberpunk 2077 would only support DX12 on the PC release, which means that gamers playing on either Windows 8 or (god forbid) older windows releases won't be able to partake in the cyberpunk dream of Night City. A special note to Windows 7 users though - the game will be supported on Windows 7's DX12 implementation as well. The decision to cut out other API's isn't an opaque one - Marcin Gollent himself said that DX12 was chosen as the only development target due to the fact that it's the rendering API for the Xbox family of consoles (including for the next-generation ones), and thus, a decision to streamline the rendering pipeline and API support was made.
The decision was also made, according to the developer, because DX12 is the birthplace of DXR - and CD Projekt Red has already announced that cyberpunk 2077 will be making heavy use of raytracing on the PC (and will almost certainly bring the same magic potion to the next-generation update to their yet-unreleased game). Marcin Gollent also said that the game will be compatible with all DX12 GPUs - but the DX12 Ultimate badge might be of interest to some of the hardware features that may be deployed in the final version of the game. A question, of course, could be asked regarding how some games' DX11 API actually delivers increased performance over the DX12 version. But with the game being originally developed with DX12 in mind, we'll have to believe it's the best version it could be.
Source:
PC Games Hardware
The decision was also made, according to the developer, because DX12 is the birthplace of DXR - and CD Projekt Red has already announced that cyberpunk 2077 will be making heavy use of raytracing on the PC (and will almost certainly bring the same magic potion to the next-generation update to their yet-unreleased game). Marcin Gollent also said that the game will be compatible with all DX12 GPUs - but the DX12 Ultimate badge might be of interest to some of the hardware features that may be deployed in the final version of the game. A question, of course, could be asked regarding how some games' DX11 API actually delivers increased performance over the DX12 version. But with the game being originally developed with DX12 in mind, we'll have to believe it's the best version it could be.
61 Comments on Cyberpunk 2077 a DX12-Only Release on PC
Well, been waiting for the other shoe to fall...
CDPR? Come on guys, don't single out your Windows 7 audience.
Raevenlord pointed out the Windows 7 support... Shutting up...
Not pitchforks, but very disappointed..Nevermind, see above...
You have offended me.
that said im hyped, that car alone reminds me of the 6000 SUX....now I want robocop in this game
CDPR never had an habit of working with open source API, and the game already got delayed twice even with that choice of streamlining the dev work by only using DX12, so imho they made a sensible choice.
It's just a reminder that you will always get people complaining. When they only showed the daytime you had people complainning about the game not being cyberpunk enough. Now that they revealed that they got the classic cyberpunk néon, you get people complaining about it being too colorful.
Would people on Windows 7 buy/play Cyberpunk in 2020? "Gamers" already switched to 10 years ago.
The OS is dead. If you're running Windows based gaming, you should be on Windows 10.
That said, folks who hated the game for no reason probably think it's easy to make a game that doesn't feel cheesy, generic or "just another GTA clone".