Star Citizen builders CIG (Cloud Imperium Video games) have formally killed off help for Home windows 7 and GPUs older than Nvidia’s GTX 700 through its launch of Alpha 3.17 which now requires DirectX 11.1 to function. The API change was crucial as the large recreation studio continues to transition Star Citizen to its new Gen12 rendering engine and ultimately to the Vulkan API.
Star Citizen has been in improvement for a really very long time — in truth, the 700 collection simply launched when CIG first launched a playable a part of the sport generally known as the Hangar Module again in 2013. Since that point, the scope of the Star Citizen undertaking has elevated massively, and consequently, adjustments made to its engine have been in depth. To the purpose the place CIG’s Star Citizen group started calling it the “Star Engine,” because of how the sheer quantity of options which were added to the engine.
The New Gen12 Renderer & Why Home windows 7 Assist Stops With Alpha 3.17
Gen12, is what CIG is dubbing its new recreation rendering structure (and shouldn’t be confused with DirectX 12). In layman’s phrases, the objective of Gen12 is to optimize all the rendering pipeline inside Star Citizen to make it extra performance-oriented.
Throughout CIG’s CitizenCon2951 occasion, Gen12 was described as a extra unbiased rendering structure, permitting objects to straight talk with the render move accountable for it. This implies Gen 12 could be seen as a renderer with a number of pipelines. With totally different rendering duties working on their very own.
That is fairly a considerable change from the previous “legacy” rendering system that’s nonetheless getting used right now in Star Citizen, CIG describes it as having one common pipeline by means of which all duties and objects required for rendering a picture must journey by means of. This in and of itself creates a bottleneck, as work needs to be carried out synchronously, or one stage at a time.
The engine Star Citizen initially ran on was Crytek’s CryEngine, the identical engine that powers the Crysis collection. However in 2015, CIG swapped Star Citizen to the Amazon Lumberyard engine as a substitute to benefit of Amazon’s Internet Providers and the superior networking options constructed into Lumberyard.
Gen12’s function set can be essential for smoother gameplay within the Star Citizen universe as CIG continues to depend on streaming tech for the whole thing of the sport. As a result of immense scale of photo voltaic methods and planets and moons, Star Citizen’s engine streams whole worlds out and in of system reminiscence in real-life gameplay — and shortly that can develop to whole photo voltaic methods. This must be carried out with a secure body fee and no loading screens, which is what Gen12 and Vulkan will assist to do, amongst different issues.
As a consequence of Gen12, CIG says will probably be very versatile to develop, and better of all it’ll permit the engine to be extremely optimized for multi-threading. This isn’t even counting Star Citizen’s Vulkan API implementation coming later which ought to develop Star Citizen’s multi-core capabilities much more.
The one unhealthy information with Gen 12 is its implementation for DirectX, which requires the newer 11.1 function set since Vulkan implementation remains to be in improvement. Partial DirectX 11.1 help did come to Home windows 7, however the full bundle is unsupported with the identical making use of to GTX 700 collection GPUs or older. To play the sport, you will want a Maxwell class graphics card and Home windows 8 or newer.
This requirement has solely come up now as a result of Alpha 3.17 is the primary Star Citizen model to start utilizing Gen12 options. Earlier patches have been nonetheless primarily based completely on the legacy renderer which allowed folks to make use of Home windows 7 and older {hardware}.
Home windows 7 Assist May very well be Coming Again
The excellent news is that Home windows 7 help might be coming again to the sport someday sooner or later, because of Vulkan help. CIG plans to ditch Microsoft’s DirectX API outright, and exchange it with the Vulkan API which does help Home windows 7. However Home windows 7 is not the one OS that might profit from the API change. CIG has confirmed that native Linux help can be coming to the sport aswell, which ought to enhance efficiency immensely for the customers who’re working Star Citizen right now by means of translation APIs comparable to Proton or Wine.
However, because it goes with Star Citizen improvement, we do not know how lengthy that can take. What we all know proper now could be that Gen12 improvement is the precedence, and Vulkan improvement will take a again seat till it’s accomplished. Since Gen12 is simply now being carried out into the stay construct of the sport, we suspect it will take over a yr on the earliest earlier than Vulkan turns into practical in Star Citizen’s Alpha surroundings.