Upcoming Performance Enhancements - Live From Epic HQ

[Michael_Noland]

@;476814

Ok, so my two questions here:

1. What about DX12 and Vulkan? I would have expected they are quite a YUUUUUGE topic when it comes to “Upcoming Performance Enhancements”, since that is why these new APIs exist. So I’m a bit sad you have not even mentioned them in the stream. When will we see good support for DX12 and Vulkan thats significantly improving performance in UE4? 4.12? 4.13?

2. You mentioned that APEX Cloth got very significant performance improvements. Will these improvements also affect the performance of APEX Destruction?

1. DX12 support remains experimental in 4.11 and 4.12. Currently both APIs are tied to specific platforms / OS versions, so they are nice to have but most games can’t rely on them to fix all their woes (e.g., most desktop games are going to want to support Windows 7 as well for the foreseeable future).

DX12 and Vulcan only help if you are bound on driver overhead (RHI thread time, especially allowing greater parallelization here, and to a small extent render thread); they won’t help with game thread or make the GPU magically faster. On the GPU side there are some specific optimizations that are unlocked by not having forced syncs after compute/uav writes, but it will be a while before we fully take advantage.

2. The improvements and optimizations were specific to cloth and will not impact destruction.

Cheers,