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We are a "nano" game dev company working on REFUSION. DX9 renderer is almost done and question is: Should we move it to DX11 or not? Anyone have experience with this?

Here are some videos from dev progress from the very beginning:

Dev test videos

EDITED: I'm going to ask more fundamental. What about NextNextGen XBOX1080 or PS4?
When? Resources? Architekture? PC DX11 -12 , next XBOX, next PS relations? Future?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Would You be so kind and post these videos on Youtube and add link here, thanks. :) \$\endgroup\$
    – user712092
    Commented Jun 23, 2011 at 9:04
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    \$\begingroup\$ youtube.com/user/GUMPANELA \$\endgroup\$
    – samboush
    Commented Jun 30, 2011 at 23:53
  • \$\begingroup\$ Are the videos linked in the question is the same a the youtube ones? \$\endgroup\$
    – Quazi Irfan
    Commented Mar 22, 2012 at 6:51

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Regardless of your technological stance, the question should be framed in terms of your market. Are you going to be creating a game that runs on all available hardware? Or are you going to be the next Project Offset?

According to Valve DX11 capable hardware is only 5.6% of the market.

The other factors are - does your "nano" team have the bandwidth create the content and pipelines that take advantage of more recent hardware? Or are you going to be beg/borrowing/stealing art to ship something?

Note that Valve themselves support a huge range of hardware. They have a scalable engine, and the resources to do so.

EDIT: Personally, I would concentrate on shipping something that makes money as soon as possible. Yes you will need to to refactor later, even if you design your engine well.

Remember your market - they point of the game is to sell. As a compromise, I would probably target DX10 as a minimum spec. You'd get around 50% if you shipped tomorrow, and the interface is a lot cleaner than DX9. I believe, but I'm not certain, that the API difference between DX10-11 is a lot smaller than DX9-10.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Question is. Where will be market after 2 years?.I'm sure that our project is targeted after this time. We are focusing primary on technology and formation of production processes now and We want to do right things at the right time. We know that for production phase we will need much more people than We have now. But these things We can buy (if money :-)). Like We did before . We paid to able painter for design creation and computer artists for basic bunch of models, textures and animations. Only what we need for testing, engine development and presentation. We are only two actually:-). \$\endgroup\$
    – samboush
    Commented Aug 20, 2010 at 0:19
  • \$\begingroup\$ But It's not question of the day. Main thing is engine. Target platform is PC and Windows but We hope that not only. In Future if money etc etc.We try to think and work like You set. Scalable. SystemLayer, InputDataLayer,DataModelLayer, RenderInterfacelayer, PhysLayer , RapidPrototypeLayer, EditorLayer,WorldGenerator, EngineCore etc. Then we implemented DX9 specification, constructed render and render pipelines in editor, made some tests and looking to future and asking questions now :-). Implementation of DX11 take some time, but it will push us to improve the rest of the engine. We think. \$\endgroup\$
    – samboush
    Commented Aug 20, 2010 at 1:43
  • \$\begingroup\$ I expanded my answer, see above. \$\endgroup\$
    – Justicle
    Commented Aug 21, 2010 at 23:52
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DirectX 11 is a much cleaner and much more powerful API than DX9 without any legacy fixed function stuff. It also allows to use DX9 and DX10 class hardware through "Level 9" and "Level 10" with the same interface.

Furthermore, you can render the same scene more efficiently than with DX9. This results in higher framerate or better visuals on the same machine.

But for a small indie development I would not take the step yet. You will completely lose the XP install base.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ It's big step for us. Technological advantages are huge and can be useful for all part of engine, not only for render & GPU physical effects. But it means lot of work too. \$\endgroup\$
    – samboush
    Commented Aug 8, 2010 at 0:19
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An immediate point is that if you have solely DirectX11 rendering, you miss out on any users still on Windows XP.
EDIT: After misreading as the project was almost finished, I think it would be good to switch to DirectX 11, since in 2 years, DX12 may be released. Though I would keep a backup option of 9 available, in case there are any xp users still.
I do not have any DirectX experience, but for the end user, there is not much difference between DirectX9 and DirectX11 features, unless they have very good eyesight and pay attention to graphics.
And a quote from the article:

What's the good news? In our testing, the DirectX 11 code path provided superior performance compared to DirectX 9 in many cases, even though the enhanced effects were enabled.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Yes U got a point. But we will work on it next 2 or more years. Then XP will be gone. I think:).. \$\endgroup\$
    – samboush
    Commented Aug 7, 2010 at 16:56
  • \$\begingroup\$ Time to finish and DX11 architecture & features are big plus for DX11. \$\endgroup\$
    – samboush
    Commented Aug 8, 2010 at 0:01

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