DirectX 12 transition is most needed thing for Elite now.

[Northpin]

The other posters in the thread also have issues, it's not just the OP. I'd not link a thread where it's just one person.

No, you linked a thread where one person complained all his dx12 games run like crap and the other complained about some performance drops after a patch.

If you want to know how a game's running you have to get that info from people somewhere

Indeed, but you really need to filter the results. Lots of people are uneducated from a tech perspective and their opinions in tech matters are worthless.

Take a look at the difference between JWE1 forums (DX11 Cobra) and JWE2 forums (DX12 Cobra)

JWE1 was DX11 and much much lighter on the system requirement.
Not the case with JWE2 which had much higher requirements (including DX12 and a minimum 4gb vram) - which raised a number of complains from people with crap computers.

 

[Christopher Roberto]

Indeed, but you really need to filter the results. Lots of people are uneducated from a tech perspective and their opinions in tech matters are worthless.

Filtering the results introduces bias, it's better to compare results for different games from the same source with mostly the same audience. Looked at as a sampling, there are a few dozen recent comments complaining about freezing and crashing in the first two pages of threads for JWE2, but not in JWE1. That's a lot of comments for a sampling of that size and a sign of widespread engine problems with DX12 Cobra.

If you want evidence of the problems that isn't from sampling forums, you could look at the patch notes where recent patches are still dealing with engine problems like stability years after release. Obviously, people have still been experiencing engine problems. Frontier is pretty vague about these for JWE2 though and just calls them "various stability fixes". Here's an example of what I mean from the most recent patch to JWE2, 1.7.0:

In some cases, they're so vague about these engine fixes that entire patches are just "various stability fixes":

They really shouldn't be struggling with engine stability years later as they've done little more than add DLC dinosaurs, they should have been able to update to the latest version of DX12 Cobra the company was using for other games to quickly incorporate stability fixes. But now we know why that didn't happen, at that time the company had switched to Unreal for their next game and the JWE2 team was on their own.

So yeah, maybe this is just a temporary thing where DX12 Cobra is shelved, but like I said, there are reasons to believe the switch to Unreal is permanent.

 

[zimms]

"Stability fixes" usually means developers fixed some bugs. Maybe some of them could crash the game.

 

[Vandaahl]

What happend to ship interiors being the most important thing?

 

[Northpin]

maybe this is just a temporary thing where DX12 Cobra is shelved

What gave you the impression their Cobra Engine is shelved?

F1 Manager is part of a special and very tight IP.
Maybe it was the IP holder Creative Rep the one that forced FDev to switch from Cobra to UE for the sake of being able to integrate easier with third parties.
Like, for example, the creators of the Trailer (another company, not FDev) were working in UE too.
It would have been harder to transform assets from Cobra to UE for each partnership regarding F1 Manager

Just saying, but it sounds quite plausible to me.

Guess we will see what their next titles will run onto...

 

[Crank Larson]

One thing I do love about these forums are the threads that occasionally pop up where back seat developers prove they know literally nothing about development (or how APIs and SDKs fit into things).

 

[Christopher Roberto]

What gave you the impression their Cobra Engine is shelved?

F1 Manager is part of a special and very tight IP.

Frontier prides themselves on their in-house engine and it's a big part of how they promote themselves to investors. They've used it for every game I know of in a very long time. Their annual report is full of how their strategy is based around Cobra, their staff's experience with Cobra, and that it sets them apart from other companies. "Our technology – our development process uses our proprietary COBRA tools and technology to facilitate innovative features." But... this time their development process didn't involve Cobra. And their annual report is silent about that, still talking about their investment in Cobra being what sets them apart. So ditching Cobra isn't something normal or that they're proud of.

Amusingly, to "facilitate innovative features", the trailer was made with the assets in Unreal 5 to showcase Nanite and Lumen.

So, it's either shelved for major rennovations or dead, with the team currently developing games on Unreal. I bet F1 Manager 2023 releases on Unreal 5.

 

[EdzUp]

This suggestion is like putting a ford fiesta engine in a formula one car and expecting it to race, no matter the api used bad code choices will always hold it back. For example look at Horizons compared to Odyssey, the former ran on so many platforms yet a few months later we were confined to one

 

[Markov Chaney - Dormant]

The optimistic view would be that they just hit a speed bump with it, had to delay it for some years of renovation, and have temporarily switched to making games with Unreal while still singing the praises of their in-house engine and not mentioning that in their annual report... But if they expected to get it back on track in a year or two, why cancel console Odyssey instead of delay for the new engine? imo, RIP.

I think that Sigmar could go either way depending on when it really started development, though. Might have still been pre-production in 2021.

Thank you for the link to the annual report.

That cites Cobra as the headline item for investment on the balance sheet and the key mitigation to a serious risk to business. Those are critical and material items so if they really dropped Cobra in 2021 and told shareholders all that at the end of 2022, someone's going to jail.

Fortunately that isn't the case; Cobra is alive and well and the hard evidence is in the annual report which for some bizarre reason you're citing in opposition.

The DX12 engine - the hardware specific elements of it - would need to be new either way, and the difference from the DX11 engine is that XBox was explicitly aligned with DX11 so it was easy to build a significant quantity of multipurpose code that is then shared between the DX11 Windows module and the DX11ish XBox module.

And equally it makes zero sense to have changed engine for Odyssey, as in your hypothetical, but STILL HAVE THAT ON DX11 - that would win you absolutely nothing.

And if you think Cobra's gone why are you saying Sigmar could go either way?

 

[Markov Chaney - Dormant]

One thing I do love about these forums are the threads that occasionally pop up where back seat developers prove they know literally nothing about development (or how APIs and SDKs fit into things).

I don't mind that part. It's a complex (and endless) domain; people get stuff wrong.
It's the part where they will give a premise or a piece of evidence X which is correct, and somehow manage to conclude Y, even though any casual passer-by would reach obvious conclusion Z, not Y, without any domain knowledge at all.

 

[Christopher Roberto]

That cites Cobra as the headline item for investment on the balance sheet and the key mitigation to a serious risk to business. Those are critical and material items so if they really dropped Cobra in 2021 and told shareholders all that at the end of 2022, someone's going to jail.

Nothing prevents them from talking it up while not using it. It's shifty, but all corporate reports are shifty.

Fortunately that isn't the case; Cobra is alive and well and the hard evidence is in the annual report which for some bizarre reason you're citing in opposition.

The hard evidence is that they're releasing games now on Unreal 4 and making trailers in Unreal 5. If you're looking at them spending 47 million britbux in FY22 on an engine they ended up not using for their next game, remember that "FY22" starts in 2021 when their engine troubles came to the forefront with the abandonment of console Odyssey and the likely beginning of F1 Manager 2022 on Unreal 4. That money might have gone towards a desperate attempt to get Cobra working in time, which obviously failed since it was a no-show. We'll know more of that story in the FY23 report, like if investment in Cobra declined in 2022.

And equally it makes zero sense to have changed engine for Odyssey, as in your hypothetical, but STILL HAVE THAT ON DX11 - that would win you absolutely nothing.

Odyssey had a major Cobra upgrade. It didn't go well and many features released unfinished, like their half-implemented PBR conversion.

And if you think Cobra's gone why are you saying Sigmar could go either way?

It depends when they really started work on Sigmar (games often sit in pre-production for a long time), since most developers don't swap horses midstream. If it was prior to 2021, I think it will be on Cobra as they were still hoping to have it ready. If during 2022, I think they'd have started it on Unreal like they had to do with F1 Manager 2022. 2021 is imo a toss-up. Even with an engine in maintenance mode or shelved for renovations, the old version would continue to be used for existing projects and possibly sequels of games that used it that aren't going to be built from scratch.

 

[Crumly]

This is nonsense. At release, the game barely ran on the typical Broadwell/Haswell rig from 2013 and just plain struggled on Sandy/Ivy kit from 2012.

DX10 level of hardware support in the GPU was mandated from the very beginning.

How did you get from "one idiot running it on a card from 2011" to "half of n million people are using kit from 2008?"

If you really are still running Windows 7 on a 2012 rig you're going to have a whole bunch of support issues that are nothing to do with DIrectX at all. This is wholly irrelevant to any game studio's move to DirectX 12.

i have no opinion on this thread but i did want to jump in and say you are totally wrong about ivy bridge. i have a i5 3570k sitting next to me that ran horizons flawlessly with a 680gtx for many years. i don't remember ever having hangups except transitioning from supercruise to gliding on planetary approach. the 680 eventually died and got replaced with a 970, but i haven't played on that PC in years now (i've been meaning to see how odyssey performs, as forum reports of bad performance on my current 3080 were far worse than my experience, haven't bothered yet though)

i don't know about the sandy bridge, but ivy i5 was really good.

 

[Jack Winter]

IME, sandy bridge was ok for 3.8 (with the usual slowdowns coming into a station, supercruise, etc), but often insufficient for 4.0 on foot content. moving my 1660Ti from to a 12.900k made quite a difference, but still wasn't quite enough for 4.0.

 

[Úlfhéðnar]

Why would you suggest Dx12 when there is Vulkan? Exblain plox

 

[BigBANGtheory [VR]]

Thank you for the link to the annual report.

That cites Cobra as the headline item for investment on the balance sheet and the key mitigation to a serious risk to business. Those are critical and material items so if they really dropped Cobra in 2021 and told shareholders all that at the end of 2022, someone's going to jail.

"nail em up I say..."
Hey it is Easter Sunday I thought it was thematically appropriate

 

[O'Roarke]

The vibe that I'm getting is that Cobra uses fixed point internally; rather then floating point.
Maybe a fine fixed point coordinate for 10µm accuracy, and another coarse fixed point coordinate for observable-universe lightsecond interval scale.

Fixed point µm-scale is typically something only engineering/construction companies use because even double-precision floats are notoriously inaccurate.
You don't want to run building stress calculations with built-in, ever increasing, margins of error.

Could work out real well for Frontier once the GPUs step over from using floats to using integers.
Unreal 5 afaik still toils around with double-precision stuff, which isn't ideal.

 

[Lulzwhat]

more than half of this games player base has a cards from the 2008s .. theres dude trying to run edo on a gtx550 and dual cores... and they complain about performance. i doubt upgrading to dc 12 would fix there perfromance problems

Freshly released EVERSPACE 2 support both 11 and 12. For example.

 

[Lulzwhat]

I'm pretty sure Cobra is dead. Their latest game, F1 Manager 2022, used Unreal. That's how they're moving to DX12.

If they move Elite to UE5 - i'm ok with that.

 

[Lulzwhat]

Lol, dont feed the DLSS troll

DLSS for Odyssey anniversary!

@Arthur Tolmie , @Bruce G , @Zac Cocken So far - almost 1 year after Odyssey release You made a lot of good things, but... Afterr ALL "optimizations" i still cant play at stable 60FPS in my native resolution (1440p) while i have far above requirements PC Only way to play stable for me and a lot...

forums.frontier.co.uk

No DLSS in update 12 = goodbye.

@Arthur Tolmie @Bruce G @Zac Cocken 1 year so far - you still not fix garbage performance. I have far above req. PC but i cant play in native resolution. I'm tired to use sideways like NIS to get close to stable framerate by sacrificing image quality. If you dont add DLSS in Update 12 - i'm...

forums.frontier.co.uk

Nvidia hire FDev to pushing 40 series?!!...

So. almost 1.5 years of Odyssey. With still garbage perfomance and without DLSS which could help with it. After Nvidia preview their new 40 seris GPU with DLSS 3 magic I'm starting to understand... What if... FDev wont add DLSS now because Nvidia hire them for add DLSS 3 later which forcing...

forums.frontier.co.uk

Even Witcher 3 next-gen have DLSS now.

@Arthur Tolmie Are you even trying, Frontier? :unsure:

forums.frontier.co.uk

Update 15 will bring DLSS?

If so, i'll return!

forums.frontier.co.uk

You can call me a troll, but it wont change the fact that Elite need some engine improvements.

 

[Lulzwhat]

why cancel console Odyssey instead of delay for the new engine?

They cancel it just becuase no consoles could run Ody good enough. Since it's niche game anyway - no point to turn release in complete disaster.