You won’t be able to play Star Citizen if you have Windows 7 or a GTX 700

Cloud Imperium Games (CIG), the developers of the ambitious multiplayer space simulation game Star Citizen, have announced that Windows 7 It will not be compatible in future versions of the game. The same would happen with GPUs prior to a GTX 700 of Nvidia, since by launching the Alpha 3.17it will be required DirectX 11.1 for its correct operation. This would be the first of the changes for improve performance of the video game by wanting to implement a rendering engine in the future Gen12 con API Vulkan.

Since its launch in 2013Starting with the Hangar Module, Star Citizen has seen how their massive video game project needs a large number of changes to grow and achieve the end result they want. They went through CryEngine on their the beginningwhich due to the situation in which the company was going, was bought by Amazon and they developed the Lumberjack Engine that Star Citizen has been using since 2015. This new update and its so-called “Gen12 Renderer” is nothing more than an update to its rendering engine, to allow a multistream flow of assets and render passes in real time.

Users of Windows 7 and an NVIDIA GPU are out of Star Citizen

To summarize, and using the example of a CPU; we could consider the previous system “legacy” renderer functioned as a renderer a thread, creating a large bottleneck. With the new system “Gen12” we put ourselves in the case of a processor multihilowhich allows us to process a series of tasks and distribute them among the different threads.

This is a fundamental improvement in this type of game with such a colossal projection of assets to process, since together with CIG’s streaming technology, they ensure that we can enjoy entire planets and galaxies no loading times and stable frame rate. In addition, the company ensures that it will be very flexible to develop, making the engine highly optimized for multithreading. Thanks to that, we expect processors with many cores to have a big advantage after implementing this update.

As a negative aspect and, as we mentioned, the fact of implementing the Gen12 renderer, is that we will require a graphics card compatible with Directx 11.1, that is, an Nvidia GTX 900 Series from now on or an AMD HD 7000 Series from now on. This is curious to say the least, because although the GTX 700 are compatible with tier 11.2, they are not compatible with 11.1 because the latter requires WDDM 1.2, which was the previous step to jump to Windows 8 and that is where the problem could really come from.

Finally, we still don’t know the release date of Star Citizen, but seeing at the rate they are going, they still have many years left. We hope to see official benchmarks soon about this new update to see how much it improves in practice.

VIA: Tom’s Hardware