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How would DX12 effect Kerbal?


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As unity 5 will support DirectX 12, I was wondering how you guys think DX12 could effect a CPU bound game like KSP. As far as I know, DX12 reduces strain on the CPU, perhaps helping with physics further, (even more parts!:D) So, what do you think the likelihood of DX12 coming to KSP is, if at all. And how would it help the game?:confused:

- Sam

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Probably not all that much, although every little bit does help. KSP isn't actually all that graphically intensive (other than the ridiculous oceans on default configs), so if you have the graphics options tuned downwards appropriately for your system, and have fixed the ocean performance by editing settings.cfg, then you're likely already mostly bottlenecked on physics and orbital maths. Hopefully Squad will fix the long standing ocean performance bug as part of the porting to U5.

If DX12 is a standard part of Unity 5, and doesn't require special support on the application end, it seems highly likely that it will be used if available. If it requires special support on the application end, then it's less likely in the short term, as 2/3s of KSP's platforms (OS X and Linux) use OpenGL, not DirectX.

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Mac OS X still uses an older OpenGL, due to Mesa and other things not being maintained, so little to no boost there.

Well at least MacOS uses 3.3, I guess that would at least give it feature parity with DX9c/10? since the shaders etc are targeted at DX9 should at least help a bit, or at least make the shaders work the same

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Well at least MacOS uses 3.3, I guess that would at least give it feature parity with DX9c/10? since the shaders etc are targeted at DX9 should at least help a bit, or at least make the shaders work the same

I don't know the specifics, I just know that MacOS is behind enough that I couldn't run SpaceEngine with Wine due to OpenGL being outdated. Hopefully it will provide some relief for the poor fellows who can't install a dual boot partition of Linux.

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I don't think KSP will be affected at all, except ambient lighting being a possibility.

However I will be affected, as those two big companies try to drive me into having to buy some $250 GTX card (My card was pretty good for its time and still is, but it's OEM, so it never made it into the GTX line and thus unsupported by a majority of card lists ;.;)

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I doubt this is particularly relevant, but I thought I'd share. As a Mac OS user I did some research and discovered that practically every Mac made since 2012 supports OpenGL 4.1 while running OS X 10.9 Mavericks, or 10.10 Yosemite. It's still behind the official OpenGL stable release, but at least it's not a full major version behind.

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I would think that DirectX 12 will not help KSP's CPU bottleneck at all, except in very rare and extreme circumstances...

For starters, KSP isn't graphically intensive. The thing that DirectX so greatly improves is the number of draw calls, i.e. individual things to draw within a scene. I can't imagine KSP being very high in the draw call department to start with; in fact I'd peg it at the low end. Planets are just a textured surface with nothing else on them beyond KSC and the rare easter egg; water is just a featureless textured surface too; the number of things visible in the sky is single-digit at any given time. All of this together probably takes less draw calls than a vessel, and the number of draw calls a vessel consumes is directly proportional to its part count. And that, as we all know, runs into a CPU bottleneck in the low hundreds. Draw calls meanwhile don't become a problem until the thousands.

Secondly, KSP is not a singlethreaded game. Its physics engine is singlethreaded, and that's what's causing the bottleneck. If your CPU has at least two cores (and 99% of all CPUs in use today do), then even if the physics engine bogs down one core completely, the other core is still perfectly able to perform all the other tasks required to run the game, such as graphics overhead. So making that overhead smaller does in no way, shape or form affect the fact that the physics engine is bottlenecked by its single thread.

I'm not saying that DX12 won't do anything for KSP... maybe it does, who knows. Microsoft hasn't even fully finished up the specification yet. But whatever it will end up doing, alleviating CPU issues is not one of those things. The PhysX 3 upgrade coming with Unity 5 is going to help with that instead.

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  • 5 months later...
As unity 5 will support DirectX 12, I was wondering how you guys think DX12 could effect a CPU bound game like KSP. As far as I know, DX12 reduces strain on the CPU, perhaps helping with physics further, (even more parts!:D) So, what do you think the likelihood of DX12 coming to KSP is, if at all. And how would it help the game?:confused:

- Sam

I think people are forgetting the multi threaded nature of DX12, which if for example we were to have gotten multi threaded physics in DX11 even on a 4 core machine we would only likely see a 120 150% increase from the single threaded physics where as with DX12 we could see a 350% ish increase over the single threaded phyic's and on an 8 core machine a 600% increase and so on.

Depending on how parallel the phyic's is but considering there porting it to the consoles I believe they will make it very parallel as the consoles have a very very very weak single core performance, that's even if they don't utilize asynchronous compute for the physics.

And if they brought that to the PC we are not just talking about a 350% increase in physic's performance for example the 6600k has ~240GLOPS of performance where as a 270X is 2560 GFLOPS, and yes I know GFLOPS don't directly translate to performance but given the right workloads it can-ish.

So yeah DX12/Unity 5 has the possibility to increase performance significantly, The asynchronous compute obviously wont be coming in 1.1 but maybe after the console version is finished. Because the only way I can see the console version coming anywhere close to the PC version is if asynchronous compute is used as the CPU in even the Xbone which has the stronger CPU is under half as strong as a midrange CPU of today 4690k 6600k FX8350 etc.

So yeah the console version as well as giving us multi threaded physics and stable 64 bit it may also give us a async compute and people were complaining about the console port being bad for the PC version.

And yes the only reason squad was able or was willing to update KSP to unity 5 however you want to look at it was because they were porting it to the consoles, I will say this again here, I don't blame Squad for waiting until they were ready to port to the consoles to update to unity 5 as they can't work for free and KSP is basically already at saturation in the PC market so yeah obviously they need to be paid for the extra work.

although its no where near certain whether they could port the physics to be able to be done with Async compute as I would assume it would be a double precision task based on X86 which would mean it would almost certainly use a butt ton of instructions a GPU just simply can't process, and if it is consumer grade GPU's don't have much double precision floating point performance at all never mind the instruction set being completely incompatible.

It would mean doing the physic's from the ground up again.

Edited by etheoma
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If they switch to better OpenGl and not directX12 then probably 90% of the posts will be waa waa I hate this game waa waa I have windows and not OS X waa waa. So probably that will happen simultaneously. And I personally despise playing this game on OS X or Linux because I love my windows and I'm not switching. I'll be very irritated if this game gets a performance update for some os and not others. And also very little Ksp players use Linux and more use Windows than OS X probably we'll have both.

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If they switch to better OpenGl and not directX12 then probably 90% of the posts will be waa waa I hate this game waa waa I have windows and not OS X waa waa. So probably that will happen simultaneously. And I personally despise playing this game on OS X or Linux because I love my windows and I'm not switching. I'll be very irritated if this game gets a performance update for some os and not others. And also very little Ksp players use Linux and more use Windows than OS X probably we'll have both.

Sorry bro DX12 is better than OpenGL end of, Vulkan would be a good alternative but OpenGL isn't even really an option. But at the moment Unity 5 doesn't support Vulkan but probably it will when Vulkan is released.

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This whole OpenGL vs. DirectX thing is entirely moot and the above responses really make little sense. Unity provides both of them (it has to, as it is multi-platform), and it is Unity that controls if/when either of them are updated to a newer version. Squad's only real say in it is when they update to a newer Unity version, and the versions of graphics code that ship with the version of Unity they have chosen.

As for the magic massive performance improvement theorised above, that's quite unlikely. Updated OpenGL and DX support will likely provide some improvement, but KSP simply does not push the graphics hard to make the massive improvements theorised likely. KSP performance is mostly limited by physics and simulation computation, not graphics, so updated graphics libraries and drivers are far less likely to deliver a big impact.

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