Cloud Imperium Game’s visual effects designer Alistair Brown recently explained what they have in store for the game when it comes to upcoming patches, including adding native support for the Vulkan API.

DSO Gaming picked up Brown’s comments from the RSI forums, where Brown explained that they would be focusing on supporting the Vulkan graphics API, and that they would be ditching DirectX 11 altogether, writing…

“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.”

Very interesting comments about the fact that DirectX 12 would “only be considered” if they found some way for it to give them a distinct advantage in rendering over the Vulkan API.

I wonder how well this will work out when it comes to optimization and playing the game on various new cards from Nvidia and AMD?

Right now Star Citizen is still heavy in development, so it will take some time before we see how this plays a role in the game’s optimization over the long haul.

They’re also still prepping for the next big build for the game in the form of alpha 3.0. Their latest release was 2.6.1. So they have a lot on their plate for the upcoming release, and the rest of the year ahead.