Fresh off the news that key Godot developers have formed a new company W4 Games supporting Godot development, this new company has already born fruit in the form of Direct3D 12 support for Godot 4. Added as a GitHub pull request pending approval, this will add a Direct3D 12 renderer along side the OpenGL ES and Vulkan support already in Godot 4. This development will help facilitate Xbox development.
Details from the W4 Games announcement:
We keep our word of donating back to the Godot Engine project anything that can be legally open sourced, so our first donation will be an implementation of a Direct3D 12 rendering device. This work was written by the very talented Pedro J. Estébanez, and it aims to bring more compatibility and platforms to Godot 4.0, including:
- Microsoft Windows (what this code donation currently supports).
- Windows Store (UWP).
- Windows on ARM.
- Microsoft Game Development Kit (GDK).
- Xbox (which can’t be supported officially by Godot due to console NDAs, but for which Direct3D 12 support is essential).
The different Windows platforms were already supported by Godot using the Open Source Vulkan and OpenGL specifications. But Direct3D is Microsoft’s own graphics specification and supporting it would be beneficial for all the aforementioned platforms.
This donation takes the form of a pull request to Godot’s GitHub repository, so the Godot contributors can consider it for inclusion (as well as give us feedback). If there is consensus on whether this should be an officially supported feature, it should be merged for Godot 4.0.
Key Links
Pull Request with More Details on GitHub
You can learn more about W4 Games adding Direct 3D 12 support to Godot 4 in the video below.