'Sniper Elite 4' Gets DirectX 12, PlayStation 4 Pro Support

For those who will be playing Sniper Elite 4 on PC or the PlayStation 4 Pro, you can expect some performance upgrades when the game launches on Valentine's Day.

On the PC side, the game will support the DirectX 12 API. If the game is too demanding with it, however, you can always switch back to DirectX 11 to play the game. Unfortunately, it seems that Rebellion was mum on the rest of the performance and graphics features that come with the PC version of the game.

The studio provided more clarity, however, for those playing on the PlayStation 4 Pro. In addition to faster load times and a better framerate, Pro players are expected to see an increase in the quality of reflections, draw distances, and geometric levels of detail over the base PS4. There’s also an improvement in “lighting and shadows fidelity.”

You can check out the latest gameplay trailer to learn more about what the game has to offer. Sniper Elite 4 is slated to release on February 14.

Name	Sniper Elite 4
Type	Shooter, Sniper
Developer	Rebellion Developments
Publisher	Rebellion Developments
Platforms	PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Where To Buy	Rebellion Store Steam PlayStation Store Microsoft Store Amazon Best Buy GameStop
Release Date	February 14, 2017

11 Comments Comment from the forums

photonboy 04 February 2017 02:04

By "demanding" with DX12 I guess you are suggesting DX12 may have issues and cause STUTTER like some of the other DX12 games?

(because there aren't any proper DX12 games yet in the sense they're really optimized for the new API. They are all basically DX11 with some DX12 code stuck in. DOOM isn't DX12 but it does a good job of utilizing the similar VULKAN API so I would arguably call that one of the few or even ONLY game using a modern API well.)
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renz496 04 February 2017 04:34

19250506 said:
By "demanding" with DX12 I guess you are suggesting DX12 may have issues and cause STUTTER like some of the other DX12 games?

(because there aren't any proper DX12 games yet in the sense they're really optimized for the new API. They are all basically DX11 with some DX12 code stuck in. DOOM isn't DX12 but it does a good job of utilizing the similar VULKAN API so I would arguably call that one of the few or even ONLY game using a modern API well.)

vulkan do better with low level API because of one reason: extensions. funny thing is many people are hoping vulkan will ditch stuff like extensions because they said it is one of the reason why most developer favoring direct x more in windows vs opengl. each gpu from different vendor built differently. so to really optimize the performance you need to cater the hardware strength. which means you need to tweak your software specifically for each hardware. this is one of the thing that direct x are lacking. developer/gpu maker already said that direct x cannot use hardware specific functions that is not part of the API itself. with opengl/vulkan it can be done because of extensions.

while doom show very promising result with vulkan that is coming from developer that has been dedicating their game development in opengl for decades. they are used with the hurdle of supporting different extensions from different IHV. but what about other developer? right now i heard something funny about vulkan. some developer out there try to make vulkan much easier to use so they kind of end up putting another layer on top of vulkan. it might ease vulkan development for developer that did not want to deal with low level stuff but i heard the performance also fall back down to opengl performance. but vulkan still have certain advantage over opengl .
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Ariel Mansur 04 February 2017 13:13

Why is it that games have to ADD dx12 support, when we are like 2 years into its use?! just WHY?, i mean arent they developed with dx12 by now? jess..
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greghome 04 February 2017 13:35

can't we get to killing Castro already?
It's the 4th game and 43rd time we're tasked with killing Hitler at this point.....
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renz496 04 February 2017 19:05

19252033 said:
Why is it that games have to ADD dx12 support, when we are like 2 years into its use?! just WHY?, i mean arent they developed with dx12 by now? jess..

market reason. if they make it DX12 exclusive then they will going to limit their sales to people with windows 10 only. if you look at steam survey there is still around 50% user still not moving to windows 10. 50% is a lot of sales.
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06 February 2017 02:00

DX12 -> biggest business gimmick by Microsoft, bullshit i didn't bought so stayed with Windows 7 where game will run better under DX11.
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Ariel Mansur 06 February 2017 02:40

19253396 said:
19252033 said:
Why is it that games have to ADD dx12 support, when we are like 2 years into its use?! just WHY?, i mean arent they developed with dx12 by now? jess..

market reason. if they make it DX12 exclusive then they will going to limit their sales to people with windows 10 only. if you look at steam survey there is still around 50% user still not moving to windows 10. 50% is a lot of sales.

NOONE said EXCLUSIVE, i meant dx12 NATIVE, then PORTED to dx11 WHICH IS OLD and less efficient, specially on radeon cards.
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Ariel Mansur 06 February 2017 02:44

19258804 said:
DX12 -> biggest business gimmick by Microsoft, bullshit i didn't bought so stayed with Windows 7 where game will run better under DX11.

HAHAHAHA sure man whatever you say.. it was co developed with microsoft and amd, because amd cards take advantage of it wayy more than nvidia's cards, then of course microsoft profits from it by making ppl use win 10 (which was FREE FOR A WHOLE YEAR), and cracked if you dont want to pay (kmspico). So your reasoning is worthless.
ALSO on win 10 you get the SAME performance on dx11, and of course you take advantage of dx12 when its available (and here comes my point: a lot of devs still into dx11.. i dont know if its for lazyness to learn dx12 ways or what but.. we have few games as of now).
And the same could be said for VULKAN which is OPEN SOURCE, and i would love even MORE for devs to use that one, which gives extraordinary results like we ve seen on DOOM.

So as you can see, i debunked every statement you made, now you are better informed, but something tells me you wont change your mind..
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renz496 06 February 2017 04:56

19258915 said:
19253396 said:
19252033 said:
Why is it that games have to ADD dx12 support, when we are like 2 years into its use?! just WHY?, i mean arent they developed with dx12 by now? jess..

market reason. if they make it DX12 exclusive then they will going to limit their sales to people with windows 10 only. if you look at steam survey there is still around 50% user still not moving to windows 10. 50% is a lot of sales.

NOONE said EXCLUSIVE, i meant dx12 NATIVE, then PORTED to dx11 WHICH IS OLD and less efficient, specially on radeon cards.

if they want to fully take advantage of DX12 then they need to go DX12 exclusively. Coalition (Gears of War 4) said that to fully benefit from DX12 they have to go DX12 exclusively to the point it is impossible to port back some of the thing they did to DX11. DX11 is old and less efficient (in paper) but it doesn't mean it is outright bad and can't be optimized. DX11 is "less efficient" with AMD card for a few reason.

1) they decided not to implement some of DX11 multi threaded capabilities into their drivers. for games that use this feature (CiV series) DX11 give nvidia absolute advantage in performance. this is from CiV 6 DX11 (this test was done before DX12 patch for CIV 6 coming out):

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Performance_Analysis/Civilization_6/4.html

2) their gpu architecture itself. one of AMD problem has always been how to effectively utilizing the raw performance they had with their card. their older card for example 6970 was rated at 2.7tflops. but in real world performance 6970 still beaten by GTX580 that only have around 1.6tflops. so solve this issue they introduce ACE hardware to GCN. but the problem is this new ACE hardware are not transparent with DX11 API. so with DX11 they cannot use ACE which suppose to increase their gpu utilization. hence AMD was pushing for async compute to be part of modern 3D API with mantle. DX12 and Vulkan take que from mantle and also incorporate async compute. although to my understanding MS did not dictate how exactly async compute should be handled which lead IHV making their own implementation.

nvidia card in general did not benefit from async compute but their architecture utilization already better than AMD even without the usage of async compute.
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renz496 06 February 2017 05:31

19258923 said:
19258804 said:
DX12 -> biggest business gimmick by Microsoft, bullshit i didn't bought so stayed with Windows 7 where game will run better under DX11.

HAHAHAHA sure man whatever you say.. it was co developed with microsoft and amd, because amd cards take advantage of it wayy more than nvidia's cards, then of course microsoft profits from it by making ppl use win 10 (which was FREE FOR A WHOLE YEAR), and cracked if you dont want to pay (kmspico). So your reasoning is worthless.
ALSO on win 10 you get the SAME performance on dx11, and of course you take advantage of dx12 when its available (and here comes my point: a lot of devs still into dx11.. i dont know if its for lazyness to learn dx12 ways or what but.. we have few games as of now).
And the same could be said for VULKAN which is OPEN SOURCE, and i would love even MORE for devs to use that one, which gives extraordinary results like we ve seen on DOOM.

So as you can see, i debunked every statement you made, now you are better informed, but something tells me you wont change your mind..

MS develop DX12 with everyone. not with AMD only. hence the existence of FL12_1 which to this date still missing in AMD hardware including polaris. most developer did not move into DX12 because of they are lazy or something like that. if you have been following what majority game developer have said you should be aware that DX12 is more difficult to do right than DX11. DX12 give more control to game developer but with increasing responsibility it is become much easier to screw it up as well. most often for game that did not go exclusively for DX12 like GOW4 we see many stability issue on their DX12 counter part. another issue is resource usage. take DXMD for example. the FPS gain is small in DX12 in real gameplay (not benchmark run) with RX480 but RAM usage was going up quite significantly from 6GB (DX11) to almost 9GB (DX12).

so my take majority of game developer will going to stick with high level API in the future due to development constraint. even with Vulkan some developer already try to create another layer on top of the API to make development much easier using the API but the trade off was the performance might not be that different than standard OpenGL. though the story is a bit different there so even if vulkan did not pose much performance different than OpenGL, using Vulkan is much better option due to the API was geared towards modern game development unlike OpenGL.
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