Engine upgrade and DX12 coming to ETS2 and ATS!

[flight50]

Have they ever said something on the topic of Vulkan?
Have they ever said whether they basically gave up on the Linux and Mac branches completely? (Currently these are still on OpenGL and the that part is seriously outdated compared to DX11.)

I don't think they verified any of this. But considering DX12 is Windows only, they pretty much have to do Vulkan as OpenGL's replacement. Its been stated that Vulkan is intended to replace Open GL and its multi platform unlike DX12.

I'm betting SCS is coding for both DX12 and Vulkan though. They kinda don't have a choice. Now will they both drop for open beta simultaneously is the question.

[harishw8r]

They have to i.e in the same point update. Otherwise it wouldn’t make sense unless they boldly drop support (which is a lame move despite the small percentage of players).

[Berniyh]

Those are maximum figures on syntetic benchmarks made to squeeze till the last ounce of performance of the hardware.

OK, but do we have data or do we keep making assumptions?

Having a CPU frametime of 15ms or having a CPU frametime of 8ms and knowing that you can do better It's not the same thing.

I don't own a 13900K in order to conduct the test myself, I just saw that in other games the differences are quite big, but not having any data prevents me from taking positive or negative assumptions.

It's quite hard to generate meaningful benchmark results in an open world game that doesn't have a dedicated benchmark function baked in.
Maybe it could work if you deactivate traffic, then define a specific starting point (e.g. city border of LA) and route at a certain time and weather (at night with rain).

[Berniyh]

I don't think they verified any of this.

Well, in the live stream linked in the first post, you can hear him specifically talking about "the next DirectX", which is a clear indication, I'd say.
Maybe he just meant it as in "what comes after DX11", but that's a bit far stretched.

From an outsider perspective, Vulkan would seem like the better choice, since it's also supported well on Windows 10/11.
That is unless they are planning to target XBox in the future, which only supports DX12.
(Which actually wouldn't surprise me.)

But considering DX12 is Windows only, they pretty much have to do Vulkan as OpenGL's replacement. Its been stated that Vulkan is intended to replace Open GL and its multi platform unlike DX12.

I'm betting SCS is coding for both DX12 and Vulkan though. They kinda don't have a choice. Now will they both drop for open beta simultaneously is the question.

They have to i.e in the same point update. Otherwise it wouldn’t make sense unless they boldly drop support (which is a lame move despite the small percentage of players).

I'm not sure if they really have to. If the OpenGL part remains in place (like it still does), then technically, they still do support Linux and OS X.
If they want to get rid of the OpenGL backend, then they either have to introduce Vulkan or drop Linux/OS X support.

Dropping Linux support specifically would be a shame now that the Steam Deck is there. ETS2/ATS seem to run quite well on those, but only at 20-60fps depending on the exact settings. (lower values for OpenGL, higher values for DX11 via Proton)
Generally, it is possible to run the DX11 branch using Proton, but it can be a bit painful to get something like head tracking running. Here the native version is better, but of course the performance and rendering quality are really far behind nowadays.

[flight50]

I don't think they verified any of this.

Well, in the live stream linked in the first post, you can hear him specifically talking about "the next DirectX", which is a clear indication, I'd say.
Maybe he just meant it as in "what comes after DX11", but that's a bit far stretched.

You asked specifically about Vulkan. I was replying to your Vulkan comment. We all know Pavel has talked about DX12, we know that part is coming. That's the only thing he has verified is what I'm saying.

[Berniyh]

Ok, I wasn't sure.

[harishw8r]

Yeah but I truly hope they wouldn’t stop supporting MacOS. I’ve recently moved on from Windows for gaming and the performance in M1 is decent (It’s impressive tbh).

(I play using the laptop screen, 100% scaling, Ultra settings and 1300-ish resolution and get around 30fps)

[flight50]

I'm sure SCS's goal is to keep all platforms going. Excluding Mac wouldn't be wise even if the numbers are smaller than pc. If Vulkan updates PC outside of Windows, that's the answer. I assume MacOS is something different. Its MoltenVK which is part of SDK.......whatever that is. At least this is what a quick Google search came up with. I'd imagine open beta kicks off with DX12 first and then bring the other platforms up to speed. Get DX12 working for the community before introducing the others. Seems like less work that way. Could be a matter of days, could be a matter of weeks but I'm sure they'll cover everyone that they do now.

[Berniyh]

I'm sure SCS's goal is to keep all platforms going. Excluding Mac wouldn't be wise even if the numbers are smaller than pc. If Vulkan updates PC outside of Windows, that's the answer. I assume MacOS is something different. Its MoltenVK which is part of SDK.......whatever that is. At least this is what a quick Google search came up with. I'd imagine open beta kicks off with DX12 first and then bring the other platforms up to speed. Get DX12 working for the community before introducing the others. Seems like less work that way. Could be a matter of days, could be a matter of weeks but I'm sure they'll cover everyone that they do now.

OS X (and iOS for that matter) do not support Vulkan and of course also not DX12, but instead Apple defined their own API called Metal, which is basically a copy of AMD's Mantle that is the basis for the DX12 and Vulkan development as well.
Why? Because it's Apple, and they really like doing something that is not the standard, even if it does the exact same thing as the standard.

Anyway … MoltenVK is a transition layer that translates Vulkan calls into Metal calls, thus allowing Vulkan applications to run on OS X, at least if all of the other OS-specific stuff was taken care of.
So it's kind of similar to DXVK (which implements DX9-DX11 on top of Vulkan) and VKD3D (which translates DX12 to Vulkan).
Whether there is feature-parity between Vulkan and Metal, I don't know. I'm not an OS X user, so my interest in Metal is relatively low.
I also don't know if there are already any games out there that use Vulkan and MoltenVK to run on OS X.

In general, I'm a bit more skeptical if they will continue to support OS X and Linux.
At least the Linux version has a couple of significant short comings that are not being fixed, e.g. radio streams are not available and iirc pedestrians don't work on Linux as well as some other graphics settings.
If I would look closer, I'd surely find other things, too.
In the changelog, OSX was only mentioned 3 times, the last time in the 1.22 update in 2015. Linux was mentioned 2 times, the last time in October 2021 (some FFB improvements).
Well and of course the elephant in the room, OpenGL, but I guess we've talked enough about that already.
That's why I asked about Linux support, because if they say that there won't any more improvements, we might as well bury that version and try to get the Windows/DX11 (or then DX12) version running as best as possible.
Unfortunately, I don't think that's really an option on OS X, since Proton, DXVK and VKD3D aren't available there, afaik.

[flight50]

Thanks for the info. I don't know much about all the translation stuff so its a good interesting read you just posted. I hope SCS does the right thing though but it will take time to reach everyone. Open beta is not required and as long as everyone understand that, things should work out. The masses will be target first I'm sure. That would more than likely be DX12 users. If DX12 is stable, then they can work on converting and doing what they need to do. I'm sure everyone will want the fancy upgrades and I'll betting it will be similar to how DX11 went.

2023 hopefully is a very exciting year worth of changes for us all though. It could be a new era where are heading into. I think SCS is even more aware of what other games are doing that are similar to what they do. Imho, they seem passionate in what they do. Not professionals by trade so some things like truck sounds lack but they seem to be gaining some decent talent across the board. I'd just like to see paid content. Free updates doesn't fund future content and salaries but paid content does.