This has been a question alongside the whole community (at least on Reddit) for awhile. With new API's becoming the standards in the future (DX12 and Vulkan), I wonder what CIG's approach is on this topic. We want a future-proofed game which has the best of the very best graphics, in our eyes this can only be done with early integration of DX12/Vulkan so that you know what the limits are of the new technology and that you can build around that.asked by Typhi

This one I actually ... because I wanted to get you guys solid, solid, solid answer ... a lot of the tech guys, like I said before, they're really not interested in getting on camera but they will write stuff up for me if I ask and explain. They totally dig the community they're just not fans of being on camera. So I asked one of our tech directors, Mr Carsten Wenzel, and he actually wrote me up some stuff so I'm going to sit here and actually read this so if I'm not looking at the camera I am reading it from paper. So his response ..."We're actively looking to adopt the new graphics APIs. As you know DX12 and Vulcan differ quite significantly from previous API designs such as DX11 and OpenGL 4.5. They try to map very closely to current graphics hardware architecture, as well as provide applications more low level control of video memory. In order to take advantage, full advantage of them we started a massive refactor of the renderer and 3D engine in order more efficiently prepare and submit items to be drawn, well beyond the scope of the massively instanced rendering optimisation done by us.""Think of a departure from a monolithic render thread to more lightweight jobs that prepare individual render passes in parallel via the job system. The hope is this will allow us more flexibility in terms of draw calls in a lot of areas without complicated runtime merging of materials and meshes, or tedious offline optimisation passes on the content creation side, for example, such as character attachments.""This refactor will lay the foundation for all future rendering and graphics work. On top of that we'll be reworking the shader system and resource management to better map those new APIs and take advantage of new features exposed by the new APIs and shader languages. Especially memory management is going to be a fairly complex matter and far more trivial but crucial in order to get the best performance. Don't underestimate the support work of video drivers do on DX11 and OpenGL.""Additionally we'll embrace asynchronous compute, taking advantage of the heterogeneous multi-GPU set ups. On-board plus discrete GPU is another possibility that might yield extra gains. That is instead of alternate frame rendering, each GPU works on different tasks for a given frame. This need some initial research first though to see how it can work and if the performance gains are actually worth the effort that they put into it.""In summary, we agree that adopting these API's is going to be essential moving forward but at the same time we want to take our time to get stuff done properly so you'll actually see a benefit over DX11, visually and in terms of performance."So answer yes we're absolutely concerned with future-proofing. I wanted to be able to read that and although I probably messed up pronunciation a little bit. The guys that are working on stuff here they know their stuff. We want to set this up in the right way that we know it going to be able to milk every thing we can. That we get the best performance. That we can support the best hardware and so on. So the guys are really taking their time and putting their energy and their big brain tech sweat into getting this where it needs to be.