Elite:Dangerous launched almost 2 year years ago and with it being one of those games that updates regularly and will probably be updating for a long time to come so that they can achieve their end goals it has come to light that one of the things that is holding the game back is the support they provide for 32 bit operating systems as well as support for DirectX 10. As a result the support is going to come to an end soon, so that they will be able to focus on providing the quality that they want.
The developer, Frontier, provided a statement via CEO and founder David Braben:
[blockquote]”As you know we spend a good deal of time planning for the future, and one issue (and opportunity) we are considering is the effect of supporting Win32 and DX10, and the benefits we would get if we were to drop them. As you know, we support leading edge technology like 4K, 8K, VR, and with things like compute shaders in Horizons we really push the boundaries overall, but there are restrictions with Win32 – particularly the amount of memory we can address at one time – and with DX10 in terms of requiring an alternative rendering solution in our code. Dropping these two would help us support high end effects with a better result – to make the game better.”[/blockquote]
But these changes will not be implemented right away. Mr. Braben provides a relative window of about six months in order to “know your opinions first, and to give warning that the change will need to come at some point…”. And while these changes seem harsh at first glance according to the statistics provided by Braben the change would only affect the 0.5% of players on a 32 bit system as well as the 2% using DirectX 10.
As a result of it not being an issue to many users there seems to be a lot of support in favor of dropping 32 bit support as well as DirectX 10 in the Elite: Dangerous community. However, when questioned with what this would mean for the rest of the community the response was a short and to the point answer of: “Principally better performance and prettier effects, but it should also help with dev time.” Which could only mean amazing things for a game that has a section of the community committed to simply taking beautiful pictures of the stars.
