3 Commando Brigade

Arma 3 2016 Upcoming features

There are big changes ahead in the Armaverse. These are just a few of the announced things that we can expect in the coming months.

* Eden 3d editor. This will hopefully make things a lot easier for mission makers. If only you knew the frustrations of placing things down on the 2d map and seeing them scattered all over the place in game.

* Units. Functionality is expected to expand and bring in-game features. I'm not quite sure what that means but looking forward to it.

* Server Browser/Launcher. This is a big one. It's currently live in devbranch. Basically, you find a server before launching the game, IT WILL DETECT AND DOWNLOAD DEPENDANT MODS AUTOMATICALLY.
Obviously the benefits for 3CB is huge. Whenever the pub is populated dozens upon dozens of people try to connect and are booted. Now Arma will sort it for them automatically.

* New audio, lighting and reflections improvements.

* New interactions and interface improvements.

* Extended scripting functionality.

* New vehicles and Aircraft. It looks like there will be a 'future' Osprey, I know this will make Parker happy. Also Lighter military vics.

* Tanoa. The new map. Not much more to be said.

* The biggest one that I am waiting for is DX12. It could see Red Team trouncing the pants off Green and Blue team. So those of you with an 8 core AMD and R9 GPU could have the last laugh.

Here is a vid. Skip to 2:40 to see the 2016 rundown.

So the short story is more things to break?

Such a pessimist 

Look on the positive side -- plenty of opportunity for fixes  :)

Maybe deal with our outstanding ones before we go hoping BIS gives us more?

And couple that with a built in A3Launcher style server browser where mods are downloaded as required

At the moment it seems that AMD hardware gets the mist out of dx12 on the very limited benchmarks available. But i imagine by the tine dx12 is in widespread use things will be back to nornal

Hence why DX12, so far, putting AMD in leaps and bounds ahead. It removes what was holding AMD back for so long.

There's two reasons why AMD get a little more perf from dx12 than NVIDIA.  

GPU drivers are extremely complex pieces of s/w requiring considerable manpower to optimize and keep up to date.  AMD has less resources, than NVIDIA, to throw into driver development and hence they lag behind, a little.  DX12, simplifies the GPU drivers by pushing the complexity to the game engines.  Thus AMD's is now able to keep up.  

AMD also created a new graphics language called Mantle.  Whilst Mantle is now largely dead it fed many concepts into both Dx12 and Vulcan (the new OpenGL).  So AMD have a little more experience than NVIDIA with some of the new Dx12 concepts.

Correct. Intel are way ahead of all their competition when it comes to processing power. The only time AMD can compete is when you start considering other factors in the equation e.g. cost or power consumption.

Dx12 is not about making single thread applications run faster. It's primary goal is to reduce/remove the bottleneck between CPU/GPU. All graphics languages prior to dx12 and Vulcan require all GPU calls to be submitted by a single thread. So no matter how well your engine is threaded, there is only one thread talking to the GPU. Dx12 allows multiple threads to talk to the GPU, and hence no more bottle neck. But it comes at a price. Now the game engine has to have all the checks and measures to ensure that its does not submit two jobs that conflict. So graphics programming just got a whole lot more complex.

For the coders out there, its like going from C#/Java to C++ in terms of complexity. ie backwards in time

Going by your analogy, what does this mean for game companies? Will DX12 games take longer to produce now that there's more manual work involved on the developer's side?