Our dear friends at PCGamesHardware had the chance to interview Starbreeze and found out some juicy tech details about the upcoming Syndicate game. According to the company, Syndicate uses an advanced and evolved in-house engine, that comes with a global illumination solution and an optimized postprocessing pipeline. Sadly though, Syndicate won’t support the DX10 or DX11 API’s. And there is no need to point your gun to Starbreeze, as this is what we’ve expected. Syndicate is a multi-platform game (therefore it’s built on DX9 by default) and as we’ve said in the past, a proper DX11 game needs to be built from the get-go with that API in mind.
As Otto Kivling, Technical Director of Syndicate, told PCGamesHardware:
“We aren’t shipping with DX10/11 support. When we first added support for DirectX, we evaluated both DX9 and DX10, but weren’t convinced that DX10 offered much more than DX9. We have considered adding support for DX11, which is a great API, but to really take advantage of DX11 we believe we would have to fundamentally re-architect large areas of our engine, and this was too risky; instead we focused our resources on ensuring the experience we deliver on DX9 is as good as it can be.”
As we’ve said and before, the DX11 implementation of most modern day games is gimmick-y. Otherwise, we’d be getting ‘tessellated-LOD’ and some other cool DX11 features, and not just insane amounts of tessellation to the game’s various objects. In other words, something like that would require a complete re-write of a game’s engine.
On the other hand, Starbreeze stated that their future games would be compatible with DX11. Moreover, Starbreeze has made improvements to the engine to take advantage of more CPU cores. Riddick – Assault on Dark Athena scaled well only on dual-core CPUs and Syndicate will obviously scale better on quad-cores, though Starbreeze re-confirmed that their title will be GPU bound.
Syndicate is currently slated for a February 24th release on current generation consoles and PC!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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