Star Citizen will support the Vulkan API and will eventually drop DirectX 11 support


Cloud Imperium’s Alistair Brown has revealed that Star Citizen will support the Vulkan API – instead of DirectX 12 – in the near future. As Brown claimed, Cloud Imperium will be using Vulkan as it is available on all the latest Windows operating system and sports the same feature set and performance advantages of DX12.

Brown also claimed that Cloud Imperium will drop support for DX11 in the future, as this should effect any of its backers.

Thankfully, and contrary to OpenGL, Vulkan runs exceptionally well on both NVIDIA’s and AMD’s graphics cards.

As Brown said when asked about DX12 and Vulkan:

“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.”