The studio behind Star Citizen has revealed that they plan on using the Vulkan API going forward, effectively dropping support for DirectX 11, as well as previous intentions of using DirectX 12.
Cloud Imperium Games’ upcoming space simulation game Star Citizen is en route to discontinue support for DirectX 11 and switch to the Vulkan API, while also abandoning previous plans of supporting DirectX 12.
The Director of Graphics Engineering at Cloud Imperium Games, Ali Brown, revealed this piece of information on the official Star Citizen forums , going on to say that the Vulkan API’s support for Windows 7, 8 and 10, as well as Linux, were the main factors in making this decision, as using DirectX 12 would restrict their user base to only Windows 10 users.
For those unaware, DirectX 12 and Vulkan are low-level graphics APIs that, if used correctly, can utilize the GPU much more effectively than previous iterations of DirectX and OpenGL.
