First, let me tell you that I read what you previously said regarding this subject. With Planet Coaster there was the huge problem of degrading performance if you build many attractions, scenery or if you had many guests. This apparently even happend if you have a monster-PC. I hope that for Planet Zoo, Frontier finally starts to support Vulkan (or DX12) as the render API. Because the current problem with Planet coaster is that all the DX draw calls are done on one CPU-core, which is a limitation of DX11. This slows down the game enormously when you've build much in-game. I know DX12 is Windows 10-only (many people have Windows 10 now and support for Windows 7 will stop at the beginning of next year!). But you can keep DX11 AND DX12 at the same time, like many games do it now. But I would prefer Vulkan even more (but would probably be more work for you); it isn't OS-specific and makes it also possible to port any of your games to Linux, Switch etc. in the future.

Frontier doesn't do this yet, probably of the time and money this costs and because they don't want to exclude people by using an API their video card doesn't support. But come on, do you guys want to stick with DX11 forever with your nice COBRA-engine. It will hold your plans back severely as you have less headroom regarding performance. Switching to Vulkan or DX12 rederer will cost very much and makes programming games more of a hassle, but it will bring better performance when you've build much in your park as the draw calls could use multi-threading. I know that the calculations in-game are done on multiple cores, but the draw calls aren't.

Thus hopefully DX12 or Vulkan will be implemented into the COBRA-engine and used for Planet Zoo and all your future amazing games. It would be even more amazing if the developers from Frontier could then also implement/backport this in their older games, especially Planet Coaster (an amazing 2.0 update maybe? ;) ). Then people can finally build the parks of their dreams. Or how NVidia would say it: the way it's meant to be played :p

Keep the good work up Frontier Developments! It is so nice to see you recycling old ideas from games that you worked on (RCT3 and Zoo Tycoon) that were licensed for another publisher, improving it sooooo much and then releasing it yourselves.
 
Yeah I’m hoping we get DX12 support with this game. I feel like read somewhere that Microsoft actually now allows DX12 on Windows 7 as well as 10
 
In that case i'm hoping they'll fix Planet Coaster as well with DX12
As much as I would love that I believe that would require a lot more work than payoff. Frankly based on what appears to be progress on Planet Zoo, I imagine development began some time ago. So one can only hope they went with DX12. Time will tell I guess
 
Yeah I’m hoping we get DX12 support with this game. I feel like read somewhere that Microsoft actually now allows DX12 on Windows 7 as well as 10
Not quite: it requires special work done by the developers of this game, . Plus it is a backport of DX12 to get it running on the almost deprecated Windows 7. So, the performance gain would probably be quite low or non-existing, maybe even slowdown. So, wouldn't keep my hopes up for COBRA engine supporting DX12 ever on Windows 7, although it would make it possible for them to drop the DX11 API altogether. World of Warcraft is the only game supporting DX12 on Windows 7 so far: https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/18263422/microsoft-directx-12-windows-7-world-of-warcraft-support .

But this topic is more about general future support of the COBRA engine for Vulkan or DX12 in general. Game developers shouldn't be held back in their technological marvels just because stubborn computer users don't want to upgrade their old unsafe almost 10 years old Windows 7 to Windows 10. Especially with the ending support for Windows 7 in mind, I hope game developers will stop supporting it to accelerate game technology innovation.

As much as I would love that I believe that would require a lot more work than payoff. Frankly based on what appears to be progress on Planet Zoo, I imagine development began some time ago. So one can only hope they went with DX12. Time will tell I guess
I know it is unlikely that they would implement it in Planet Coaster, but one could just hope, haha. They will probably implement it in Planet Coaster 2. I still hope they will announce an amazing 2.0 update in the future for Planet Coaster with support for Vulkan or DX12.
 
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I have no idea what you are talking about, OP, but I whole-heartedly support this suggestion!
Lol, you don't know what I'm talking about and you support me? My god, I should run for president and get support like that :p

you will need a monster cpu.
What do you mean? DX12 and Vulkan IMPROVES the performance generally (when implemented correctly) of PC's with weaker CPU's as it can use multiple cores better to do all the draw calls. So, yes, currently you need a monster CPU to run Planet Coaster properly when you have a lot of attractions and guests, but DX12 or Vulkan API support should require a less powerfull CPU to get the same result and result in more FPS, even in case of a monster CPU.
 
No way I’m buying this unless the performance is substantially improved over PC

I have a monster rig and can’t build a sizeable park without brining it to its knees and down below 10FPS. Yeah I know it’s all about visitors numbers and building parts used etc but it’s just not an enjoyable experience. Games with this level of ambition should be left for 5 or years when the hardware can keep up
 
No way I’m buying this unless the performance is substantially improved over PC

I have a monster rig and can’t build a sizeable park without brining it to its knees and down below 10FPS. Yeah I know it’s all about visitors numbers and building parts used etc but it’s just not an enjoyable experience. Games with this level of ambition should be left for 5 or years when the hardware can keep up
Or when they release support thus for a a more close-to-the-metal API like Vulkan or DX12, which could improve FPS when many DirectX draw calls have to be made; this happens when you have many guests, attractions and scenery. I read a lot of responses regarding this on the Steam forum, but there the forum moderator just gives the standard answer about DX12: We don't want to leave people behind with older versions of Windows. This argument is not really a thing at the moment in my opinion, as I explained. Would love to hear the opinion of the devs regarding this :)Would love to hear if they have plans to implement it in the (near) future and if not, what the reasoning is behind it.
 
One of the most disappointing aspects of PC for me was the problems with building a good-sized large, very detailed park, closed with only a few rides and no peeps...and get such low fps that it was a struggle to continue to even work on the project and so I'd abandon it. Especially when it happened several times.

I don't have cutting edge equipment, it exceeded the system specs, but the game wasn't always even using what I DO have to it's full potential. I didn't see the need to upgrade when the game itself wouldn't take advantage of the upgrades. And I wasn't the only person experiencing this.

If Planet Zoo isn't upgraded to take advantage of what is considered standard now, even if I upgrade my hardware, I'm not going to buy just to be disappointed again.
 
No way I’m buying this unless the performance is substantially improved over PC

I have a monster rig and can’t build a sizeable park without brining it to its knees and down below 10FPS. Yeah I know it’s all about visitors numbers and building parts used etc but it’s just not an enjoyable experience. Games with this level of ambition should be left for 5 or years when the hardware can keep up
I feel the same way. I even feel like they owe us an answer regarding this, as I think this was (and still is!) one of the biggest issues with Planet Coaster.


One of the most disappointing aspects of PC for me was the problems with building a good-sized large, very detailed park, closed with only a few rides and no peeps...and get such low fps that it was a struggle to continue to even work on the project and so I'd abandon it. Especially when it happened several times.

I don't have cutting edge equipment, it exceeded the system specs, but the game wasn't always even using what I DO have to it's full potential. I didn't see the need to upgrade when the game itself wouldn't take advantage of the upgrades. And I wasn't the only person experiencing this.

If Planet Zoo isn't upgraded to take advantage of what is considered standard now, even if I upgrade my hardware, I'm not going to buy just to be disappointed again.
Couldn't agree more. I even upgraded my PC to a 6700k few years ago mainly for Planet Coaster (which was top of the line then) only to be disappointed by no performance improvement at all.


Not an expert but does the COBRA engine utilized all CPU cores?
Not on Planet Coaster. That's why the performance is so bad or even unplayable for alot of people.
 
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Im all in on this decision! DX11 for a game of this magnitude would squander the whole experience. No excuse for a AAA game to be dropping frames in this day and age, unless its your own hardware's limitations.

Edit: Just realized the irony of my signature if this doesn't happen lol.
 
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Ok, so, Planet Zoo got released last November and I bought it last week. And I was very dissapointed to see that the game-performance is not good and the game is still DX11-only; going into the first zoo of the campaign/tutorial, I get at around 40 FPS at the highest graphics settings and 50 FPS at the same spot with the lowest settings. With my GTX 1070, I7 4790K, SSD and 16GB DDR3 memory, I wouldn't expect such performance numbers. Lowering the graphics settings and that having almost no effect on the FPS, shows that I'm clearly CPU-bound.... Please developers, I know my CPU is quite old, but it was almost the fastest CPU then and it still holds up compared to the new ones. Please improve multithreading-support and please consider implementing fully optimized Vulkan-support into the Cobra-engine, so that users will be less CPU-bound. CPU-bound is normally a perfect case for implementing a low-level API into your game. See cases like Doom 2016 or Rainbow Six Siege: implementing a low-level API can bring significant performance improvements if you are CPU-bound.... I know it's not like a wonder-drug that would give me 4K 144 FPS haha, but it would help a bit probably and maybe gets my PC to hit 60 FPS at the same level as I talked about earlier. I also know you worked for years with this engine and having to implement a low-level API will cost a lot of work, money and development-time, but in the long-run it will be worth it; better performance for this game and your future game, like Planet Coaster 2 ;) Just go with the time guys; DX11 is just not enough anymore for the great games you make.

Edit: and yes DX12 could be backported to Windows 7, but the performance will generally be not that good. So, DX12-support would be Windows 7 and Windows 10 only, with no performance improvement on Windows 7.... Windows 7 is very old, has reached End-of-Life. Leave it alone I would say. Vulkan would thus be a better fit as it has multiplatform-support and it seems developers generally like it more because it has better CPU-performance, see: https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/...MO2nVQGZxvFhBb5/vulkan-api-testing-on-live-pc

Edit2: would be awesome if a developer of the game could respond to this and maybe explain the lower performance and the reason they stick with DX11 to us. And people, please don't talk about that the game is badly optimized as I'm sure they optimized the out of the DX11-renderer, they probably just hit its limits.
 
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Performance is fine on my side.
How high FPS do you get on the first campaign level with what hardware? Yes, performance will be fine on small parks, but not really in a bit larger parks.
You can put it manualy to dx12... i had issues with the game (lagg, stutter), and the moment i changed it to dx12 the stutter and lagg were gone.. also increase in fps :)
How can you do that? Haven't seen that option.... I hope you're not trolling us. But I will take a look at it.

Edit: couldn't find any DX12 option in the settings menu :( So, how did you do it then or are you trolling?
Edit2: there is also no option for it in the configuration files...
 
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Check google for how to do it, i am not at home right now.

And no, i am not trolling... Please dont falsly accuse people if you dont see an option, that doesnt mean that it is not there... :/

It is a code that you need to place some where in order for it to work (again: check google, i am not at home)
 
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