Just as well since Apple hasn’t come out with that SkyLake MacMini I was hoping for…maybe a MacMini Skylake will come out same time as 5.4 & dx12
This thread:
But seriously you have no idea how many amazing people we have hired. R&D has never operated at the current speed.
We could have officially given you DX12 in 5.2 but without any performance benefits, so what’s the point? We were optimistic with 5.3 (as engineers always are) but the call to delay it to 5.4 was absolutely correct. All this time we were improving the job system, internal particle rendering, making render loops go on other threads, refactoring various rendering related systems to be thread safe, changing internal data structures and, most importantly, delivering all these improvements on all platforms that support threads, and all graphics apis. DX12 is just a cherry on top as it can make an even better use of all these improvements (Metal/Vulkan too).
TL;DR - you can not scale code refactoring very much.
We haven’t really promoted DX12 or Vulkan yet. One blog post does not count 
DX12 is simply first, because libraries/drivers were ready first.
In what universe?
Just to reiterate that performance improvements are expected on all platforms and graphics APIs that support threading.
7 Likes
Let’s face it, next gen, super shiny, massively scoped in size and content games have been made using GL / DX11. These cost multi-millions way outside the scope of us mere “indies”… I’m sure DX12’s intervention will allow me to be a much sloppier games developer, which is nice. But it’s not exactly a deal breaker…
Let’s face it again, there are some holes in Unity’s tools / feature sets that really could do with addressing first.
Also when I said it “baffles” me why it takes so long to implement X that’s not entirely true. You moved into an old house / apartment block, it needed renovating but day to day stuff got in the way. You went and visited someone else’s house, got a fresh perspective, travelled back home and said “is this really where I live”? Started renovating, noticed you had some leaky pipes / bad foundations and realised there was more to this than met the eye.
Hired a bunch of specialists in to put things right, they tell you it’s going to take longer than you think. Taking their sweet time on some parts so other teams are waiting on your “specialists” or vice versa. Also with the amount of rooms you support, maybe you bit off a bit more than you could chew.
I bet you think? How do I know? Well because it happens ALL THE TIME, not just in software development. The fact that it’s taken over a year to implement a modern anti-aliasing solution proves it.
Even if you believe I’m a numpty that doesn’t have a clue, I’m literate enough to read and write (that’s how I’m typing this post right now). So I can at least deduce when Epic pumps out release notes from one version to another, which said release note’s time difference between version with and version without is two months to create said effect, that’s a reasonable basis for how long it takes. Irrelevant of any prior experience I may or may not have…
So one can only conclude, you have a lot of other “stuff” to deal with. But from my perspective, I rent an apartment / room… I only care about the state of said room…