As I said: The vast majority of users are used to upgrade their PC to play current games. It has been like that since x86 computing became mainstream in the early 90ies. And it hasn't been as cheap as it is now. Since they have been holding off on upgrades for years now, they have enough cash. And they have been upgrading for other reasons, since PCs are general purpose computers.
But game companies need to make money as well. And people won't simply put down much money for outdated games. It's simply not justifyable, since there are so many good old games on steam, gog etc. That's why Frontier never made as much money from their kickstarter campaign as CIG. People complain about the Horizon price, because they feel they don't get their money's worth.
Even on old hardware, E
is outdated. My old desktop was a Q9550/8GB RAM/GTX 670 w. 4GB VRAM and SSD. E
was running perfectly on it, yet the machine was from 2008 and too slow for everyday work. Got replaced by an 5960X/64 GB RAM/Tripple Titan X setup. So people first buy new hardware, then spend money on games that actually use it. Then complain about the Horizon price, because it's too expensive for old tech.
Gaming is also a rather cheap hobby, that's why so many young people are into it. If you go skiing, travelling, are into photography, drone building or whatever, chances are you will be putting down a lot more money.
You always get people like this, and they can be easily ignored, as they are not the ones that earn you much money. It's the silent ones you have to worry about, that check out a game and then say: Yeah, for this outdated engine and derivative gameplay, I'm not putting down that much money.
DX9 support is just simply not something an average gamer needs. I moved on to DX10 in 2008, as a late adopter.
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You can do similar stuff with OpenCL, which also would work on AMD. Since the current route planner is pretty much broken, there is no reason not to remake it with current tech. Even without HW acceleration, it could at least be done multi-threaded, reducing calculation times by 3/4 up to 7/8 (assuming we are talking about the usual consumer CPUs)
Consoles are an expensive niche market - you can't think people don't put down money for hardware and then go on to mention consoles, as those things cost extra in TCO calculations, from the need of extra floorspace to dependencies in display devices etc. (most people will end up with an TV set!). And they are not very relevant to general gaming since the end of the 90ies.
Again, it's all about staying current. If Frontier doesn't do much for their customers, they are not going to pay them much money. And while they buy Elite for nostalgia, and are hopefully mostly happy with it, they focus their spendings on projects that take gaming one step further, rather than endlessly recycling outdated tech. Why would someone want a Cobra engine, when they could have CryEngine that shows things much more detailed and even smoother at 4k?
That's the thing, most people do NOT upgrade their PCs, that is why Blizzard only upgraded WoW to a certain point and stopped, it was literally costing them millions of customers. I have 3 friends who had played WoW since it was in beta who no longer play due to the current very low end requirements, they won't upgrade for a GAME, and everything else they do with their PCs works just fine. They'll upgrade if they have to because nothing they use works, that's it, and that happens to be the typical response from the majority of PC owners, if my Office or Word or TurboTax works, it's good enough, so what if I can't play a video game, I've got my PS/XBox to game with!
That's the other thing, consoles ARE the vast majority of the video gaming market. I have a gaming PC and a XBox, my grandson has his own XBox and my son in law has one as well, but they don't have a PC, just a laptop that my daughter uses to rip her cd's and do the budget on, an old POS laptop that has problems with Facebook games no less, but it did what they needed, run Office and burn cds, since all gaming is done via the XBoxes they have(I've finally convinced her to get a real PC by showing her Elite and explaining how I can teach my grandson MY passion for astronomy, physics and astrophysics via the game, she doesn't know it's on XBone, or she'd go that route). I have a number of friends and co-workers who all have consoles that they game on, any PC or laptops they have are purely for social stuff, Facebook and the like, or budgeting stuff or work and that's it, why would they game on them when they have a PS3/4, XBox 360/1 that they spent X hundred of dollars on? I have a few friends locally who use a PC for gaming, and those are all older systems that can barely do DX9, they play LoL or WoW or some other game along those lines, they don't NEED a top end computer, hell they don't even need a vidcard that's younger than 6 years old, IF they even need that.
The console game market is a multi-billion dollar industry, it's not a niche market by any means, it's THE largest part of the gaming market these days. CoD:AW spent more on advertising and PR than Chris Roberts has raised for Star Citizen by over twice as much, and that was JUST the PR budget for the game, it doesn't include the development budget at all. The sales of CoD:AW on PC weren't very impressive but the console sales..yeah, millions of copies sold for the consoles. There is a reason Elite Dangerous has an XBOne port and will have a PS4 port in the future, it's a much larger market than the PC market is anymore, plus it's future proof, you build for a single set of hardware and that's it, there's no changes to worry about as hardware advances. Which is also why so many people are going to consoles over PCs, spend your money once and you are set for years without any worries. I don't know where you got the idea that consoles were a niche market, the exact opposite is true, they are the majority market, have been for years now. Rather sucks if you ask me, I don't like console games much, got an XBox just so I could game with my son in law and grandson, zombies with both of them and Borderlands 1 and 2 with my grandson, I wouldn't have one otherwise. I much prefer the PC for gaming, far better control interfaces, a lot more options and better graphics and game play usually. BF2 on the PC was amazing, BF2 on the console was not, same game, but the console port required less players possible, much smaller maps and the loss of other aspects of the game, console just couldn't deal with it all like the PC could. Destiny on the other hand, not much different, but it was also designed FOR the console first and foremost, and it shows. That I play on the XBox because there's no point in getting it on my PC, it'll play and look the same, so why bother, plus there's no where near as many PC players as their are console players. Welcome to the future of video games, enjoy the PC games while we still can, consoles will be eating the market up before another decade has passed at this rate.
As to that paper, it's a really cool thing, the math is a bit beyond me, I'm physics based, but I do understand the basics behind it. I also understand, as a coder, that creating something specifically FOR CUDA, as they did, doesn't mean it will work with OpenCL, quite the opposite actually, or they would have done it in OpenCL to begin with. You can't port CUDA functions to OpenCL, doesn't work, CUDA is proprietary, nVidia owns it and they won't share it. Rather sucks but that's how it works, often times open source software is simply not capable of doing what proprietary software can, especially in conjunction with proprietary hardware, open source is left in the cold with that combination at work.
As to making the graphics in Elite better overall, sure, it's possible to do that, but the problem is, when you do that, you DO end up cutting out the low end systems, it's not something you can get around doing anymore, the way DX9 and DX11 work precludes that, and that's on MS and no one else, THEY did that. DX12 CAN be updated to and you can still retain DX9 functionality, but it's damn near impossible to do and requires a hell of a lot of work and essentially 2 different graphics engines, simply because of the way DX12 does things. Chris Roberts discussed it a bit in regards to Star Citizen, it IS being upgraded to DX12, thing is, they will dropping DX9 and only supporting DX11 and DX12 once the process is finished, for the above reason. CryTek already upgraded CryEngine 3 to DX12, they totally dropped ALL DX9 functionality from the engine when they did that, same reason, which is why other game makers using the CryEngine 3 are stuck now. If they upgrade to the DX12 support version, all DX9 support is gone, engine literally won't run for anyone with DX9, which is why PGI, the makers of MechWarrior Online, aren't upgrading to DX12, not now, not any time in the future, it would cost them well over half their playerbase which is a pretty big number of players(more than bought Elite Dangerous) to lose. They would still have enough players to make a profit and continue the game, but the PR backlash would destroy the game, so it's just not worth it. Unlike SC which isn't released yet and IS using cutting edge tech, MWO already has an established player base and has been using DX9 tech since day one, so it's a no-go to upgrade the game engine, even though they have both a 32 and 64 executable and could, technically, release a DX12 upgrade for the 64 exec only. The logistics of that are just stupidly complicated however, so that's not even a possibility. As for Elite, again, like MWO, established game, DX9 is part of that established player base, we'll find out exactly how many people get hosed when Horizon releases as it is pure DX11. Those numbers will determine if the graphics get updated as SOME of us would like or not. They lose too many players, I wouldn't be counting on better graphics for the main game, only Horizons, which may well be the ONLY expansion that is DX11 or better depending on those numbers. If they lose very few, well, no reason to NOT upgrade the graphics and finally move to DX12 with even MORE graphical goodness.
Here's to hoping that Horizons costs us very few of the player base *raises glass*
