Star Citizen is an upcoming space simulator video game based on Amazon’s own Lumberyard engine. Cloud Imperium’s Chris Roberts had discussed that the game will be getting Direct X support but it seems that the plans have changed.

ears ago we stated our intention to support DX12, but since the introduction of Vulkan which has the same feature set and performance advantages this seemed a much more logical rendering API to use as it doesn’t force our users to upgrade to Windows 10 and opens the door for a single graphics API that could be used on all Windows 7, 8, 10 & Linux. As a result our current intention is to only support Vulkan and eventually drop support for DX11 as this shouldn’t affect any of our backers. DX12 would only be considered if we found it gave us a specific and substantial advantage over Vulkan. The API’s really aren’t that different though, 95% of the work for these APIs is to change the paradigm of the rendering pipeline, which is the same for both APIs.

This announcement was done on the Star Citizen’s official forum, possibly marking it in stone. After Doom, it seems that Star Citizen will be the second AAA game which would have inherent support for the Vulkan API.

The decision for going in for a Vulkan API instead of DirectX 12 only, is because of the fact the game is releasing for Linux as well as Windows, and the Vulkan API only supports Windows 10 meaning the developers intend the game to be available on all PC platforms instead of Windows 10 only.