Please do no use D3D10.1

[Kaldaien]

Feature level 10_1 of D3D11 is acceptable, but you are killing off your customer base if you actually ship a game that uses D3D10. There may still be time to fix this.

[shadowflash]

D3D10 is a cancer yeah. DX9, DX11, OpenGL 3.3 but not D3D10.1

[Ikagura]

what's that?

[Red]

It supports both DirectX10 and 11.

[Kaldaien]

Originally posted by Kanaev:

Please elaborate how is it bad that we have more options?

D3D10 has poor driver support, poor third-party support, poor tool support. It's a nightmare that no developer should be subjecting themselves or their customers to. Because of how niche the API version remained for its entire period of relevance, driver support has not improved, third-party software such as video capture has not improved, tools to debug it never materialized.

You are not getting more options if they actually go with D3D10.1 as the system requirements suggest. D3D10 has a minimum feature set that far exceeds D3D11, for one thing. D3D11 can run on D3D9 class hardware using the appropriate feature level when the game starts -- D3D10 has no feature levels and D3D10.1 requires hardware that supports every feature in D3D10.1.

The set of features exposed by D3D10.1 is referred to as feature level D3D10_1 by the D3D11 runtime. D3D11 also has D3D9_1, D3D9_2, D3D9_3, which correspond to the various iterations of D3D9. That's why D3D11 actually gives more choice, it can scale back to D3D9 if a game does not need any features newer than D3D9.

There is no reason to screw your customers over with an API that will only cause everyone pain and suffering. D3D10 was a stop-gap, D3D11 is the only API you should be using if you want D3D10 features.

[Antitype]

Originally posted by Kaldaien:

D3D10 has poor driver support, poor third-party support, poor tool support. It's a nightmare that no developer should be subjecting themselves or their customers to. Because of how niche the API version remained for its entire period of relevance, driver support has not improved, third-party software such as video capture has not improved, tools to debug it never materialized.

Originally posted by NISAAlex:

Second, we will be prioritizing development resources in the following categories:

1. Random crashes
   
2. Framerate
   
3. Language-related issues

Checks out.

[Seraphita]

And I wondered why I saw DX9 and 11 a lot but not 10... Well this explains a few things.

[Chouchers]

Originally posted by shadowflash:

D3D10 is a cancer yeah. DX9, DX11, OpenGL 3.3 but not D3D10.1

dx12 and vulkan way better

[Kaldaien]

Originally posted by Zero:

And I wondered why I saw DX9 and 11 a lot but not 10... Well this explains a few things.

Yeah, D3D10 is functionally more similar to D3D11 than D3D9, but still didn't gain mass appeal before D3D11 was given to the development world.

D3D11 addressed many of the really nasty gotchas first introduced by D3D10 (in particular the each API version requires a fixed-set of hardware capabilities problem). The funny thing about that, though, is that D3D10's original design was motivated by developers not liking how much of D3D9 is optional features that you have to check whether the hardware supports at startup. D3D9 was creating situations where you potentially wrote 2 or 3 different versions of certain parts of your engine to work on one GPU vendor's hardware if their feature support is different from another. But raising the bar as far as D3D10 did tended to be counter-productive, alienating huge swaths of the userbase - so any simplification here came at the cost of droves of customers.

Microsoft finally addressed the whole capabilities problem in a really nice way with D3D11. They introduced feature levels and support tiers for features. Tier0 - Tier3. This tier and feature lvel design carried over to D3D12 even if nothing else did :)

In addition, D3D11 added multi-threaded rendering features (that aren't utilized all that much), new higher quality texture compression formats for the first time in a decade and tessellation/compute. D3D11 is the true successor to D3D9, and D3D10 is something developers who used it would like to forget about :)

[devSin]

Originally posted by Chouchers:

dx12 and vulkan way better

Not really. Those just shift the burden from the driver to the game developer.

In Nvidia's case, DX11 is always preferred. DX12 and Vulkan are good for AMD, but only because their DX11 drivers are so terrible.

[Ikagura]

What's Direct3D?

[Kaldaien]

No idea,sorry.

[Kaldaien]

Originally posted by Kanaev:

Originally posted by devSin:

Not really. Those just shift the burden from the driver to the game developer.

In Nvidia's case, DX11 is always preferred. DX12 and Vulkan are good for AMD, but only because their DX11 drivers are so terrible.

Dunno. Vulcan is really freaking amazing for old Nvidia cards as well. It made doom playable for my friend. I really want vulcan in all new games, not D3D12. Because I'm not gonna install Win10 untill a 12 only game that I want appears. Even then maybe not. Microsoft can go ♥♥♥♥ themselves with their forced exclusivity.

That's a really, really bad idea.

I assume you're running Windows 7 right now? If so, your system supports D3D11.0 and a limited portion of D3D11.1 (with driver support for that limited portion being very flaky).

Windows 8 supports up to D3D11.3 and Windows 10 supports D3D11.4. You are actually hurting yourself, and the rest of the industry by forcing game development to tailor to D3D11.0

Even games that use D3D11.0 still appreciate a boost in performance beginning with Windows 8. The DWM is much more efficient.

[T]

This is second hand info from someone with a beta copy, but they are using texture compression that requires 11_0 feature set.

So it's 11.

[IndigoAK]

Originally posted by Kanaev:

Originally posted by Kaldaien:

That's a really, really bad idea.

I assume you're running Windows 7 right now? If so, your system supports D3D11.0 and a limited portion of D3D11.1 (with driver support for that limited portion being very flaky).

Windows 8 supports up to D3D11.3 and Windows 10 supports D3D11.4. You are actually hurting yourself, and the rest of the industry by forcing game development to tailor to D3D11.0

Even games that use D3D11.0 still appreciate a boost in performance beginning with Windows 8. The DWM is much more efficient.

I'm more than sure that microsoft could've patched Win7 to support all that. If not for the required OS change because of the companies policy to age hardware and software at a certain rate - I would've still used XP or even '98. I switched to 7 only when I found out that my pre-purchased Bioshock Infinite wouldn't run on XP.
Cosidering that they only release D12 only games on their own ♥♥♥♥♥♥ marketplace - I'm not moving to the 10 any time soon.

14 of the 20 games currently released that feature D3D12 are available on storefronts other than the Windows Store.

All 20 of them are available on other storefronts if you count their Xbox One versions.

[devSin]

Originally posted by Kanaev:

Dunno. Vulcan is really freaking amazing for old Nvidia cards as well. It made doom playable for my friend.

Doom uses OpenGL.

OpenGL on Windows (for games) is just really bad in general. There's a huge variation between the vendors and even product families.

So it's good for Doom (since it allows them to bypass the terrible GL drivers), but DX11 would have been even better.