Ali Brown · Director of Graphics Engineering

No, and it would be lovely if we could do that, but the continuous live release means that to do that, we would have to keep both sets of code in parallel for like a whole year, and it's too painful to maintain both when we have constant features we're working on. So as we finish something, we leave it in an experimental stage for a while where we internally turn it on for the graphics programmers, and then once we're confident, we turn it on for the rest of the studio, and then the next patch that happens to come out will benefit from that. I think, as you already mentioned, all the post effects have already been converted. We've been focusing on getting the geometry done, which is the biggest part of the game. At the stage we are today in our internal stream, all of the opaque geometry is done, which is the vast majority of the game. And then the shadows are coming straight after that. They're basically done, just awaiting some testing. So really the big bits that are left are just to deal with the transparent geometry and then a few miscellaneous effects like the blackout effect and things like that, the final piece of polish. But yeah, the hard parts have been largely tackled. And transparency is still a problem. There's plenty of issues there. But the bulk of it is making very good progress and won't be too much longer.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So I just want to reiterate again before we move on that this is already coming out and releasing in parts, and sections of it are turning on. So backers are already seeing the work and results of some aspects of it. They'll see more aspects of it in 3.17. They'll see more aspects of it in 3.18.

Ali Brown · Director of Graphics Engineering

Every release will have more this year. They'll be faster and faster.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So there will just be a time when it's like, okay, everything has now been converted over. But again, it won't be like a big boom, like you logged in on Thursday and the game ran one way and you logged in on Friday and now the game runs a different way. It's already in progress. It's already happening. It's already releasing. It's a little bit after a little bit after a little bit kind of thing.

Ali Brown · Director of Graphics Engineering

Yeah. There's certain parts where there will be bigger differences than others. But the problem is, with a PC game, everyone's machine is different. So some people will be bound by that. Maybe they've got a really old GPU. Maybe they've got a four-core system versus an eight-core system. So everyone's going to have different performance characteristics. So there will be some unlucky person somewhere where Gen12 makes no difference to them, and there'll be someone else who sees their frame rate tripled. It's hard to give a general rule. But at each stage, we expect to see benefits. Probably the biggest ones might come towards the end, because the focus initially is going to be getting things working, getting things so they don't regress and get worse in terms of performance as far as the backer sees. But in terms of actual performance improvements, once it's all working, we'll be like, right, pile on, let's see what's actually not working as it should in terms of performance. And then the final switch to Vulkan is probably the biggest change. And that one is going to be a bit of a binary. You either use Vulkan or you're not. Everything else is going to be more gradual.