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Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

This is the key question. If Microsoft decides one day to offer the next DirectX version only for UWP then the developers will either have to eat humble pie or leave the platform.

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I don't think that would be a smart move. Considering Steam is one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) gaming hubs for Windows and other platforms, if they blocked this and somehow forced people to use the Store/XBox instead, it could backfire and lead gamers en masse to the Steam OS and hardware, for example.

These "migrations" of users from one service to another should happen naturally to be successful. Not enforced because of platform restrictions, but based on these new platforms being actually better and more desirable for the end user.

It would be now, but that seems to be why Valve created SteamOS in the first place. They were clearly worried about the same things as Epic and wanted to have the threat of a viable platform for people to migrate to if Microsoft treated the open Windows platform poorly.

> This is the key question. If Microsoft decides one day to offer the next DirectX version only for UWP then the developers will either have to eat humble pie or leave the platform.

Couldn't they just keep using the previous version of DirectX?

That will eventually turn into a question like "Why not just keep using Win16?"

It isn't meant to be permanent. It's meant to be a a stopgap until developers have time to transition to something which is neither DirectX nor Windows.

This is confusing, and I don't found enough data yet.

But seemly DX12 IS heavily tied to UWP, for example there were many rumors in gaming forums, that some UWP "features" (like locked vsync at 60 FPS, and game always being full-screen window, not allowing true fullscreen or true window) will be enforced in games that use DX12.

There is also rumors it is the other way around, that to use certain DX12 features you must make the app at least UWP compatible, this mean locking vsync and making it only support borderless fullscreen...

But the situation is just a mess and I don't found any comprehensive data yet.

Rumors in gaming forums and a dollar will get you something off the dollar menu at McDonalds. People in gaming forums say all kinds of things and a lot of them are absurd conspiracy theorists.

I've yet to see anyone point out an actual technical feature of UWP that you can't get by delivering a normal Windows app through Steam, just store features like crossbuy with Xbox One. There are several features that normal Windows apps have that UWP apps don't have yet, as noted, and DirectX 12 is fully available to all Windows apps.

Honestly, if we're picking the lesser of two evils, I'll pick Microsoft over Valve, the company that just got around to notifying people of security breaches that happened over Christmastime this week. Valve seems to be in this weird place where they don't want to make retail games anymore because of all the Steam cash they have rolling in but they don't want to actually have to manage Steam, they want users to curate the store for them and basically are engaging in less-than-benign neglect.

Can't they use Vulkan instead of DX12? I would've thought Vulkan would be supported on the Windows platform.

It would likely be in addition to, but I think even those heavily invested in DX (whether using their own engine or on top of someone else's), which is certainly a shrinking group since there's a much broader emphasis on cross-platform compatibility these days (especially mobile), would still consider Vulkan if only so that the 35% of Steam Windows gamers still on 7 that could use DX 12 if they were on 10 can enjoy the benefits too. (There's even more reason to use Vulkan if there's a sizable set of GPUs that support it but don't support DX12, not sure about that though.)

It is not clear they would want to though. Developers are heavily invested in DX.

My understanding (and this could be false) is that many games are based on externally developed game engines, such as Unreal and Unity. If these game engines make use of Vulkan (which they are almost bound to do so, CryEngine already has early support) then does it make any difference to the developers of the games?

The only thing I could think of where it might matter is if the GPU drivers have better support for DX12 than Vulkan, resulting in better performance, but I have no idea if that's the case.

It's not uncommon for people using engines to still need to appeal to the underlying frameworks.

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