By supporting Direct3D 12, Godot gains support for multiple new platforms, such as:
- Windows Store (UWP).
- Windows on ARM.
- GDK.
- XBox —which can’t be supported officially by Godot, but for which Direct3D 12 support is essential—.
Depending on the complexity of the scene, effects used, etc., this first version of the renderer performs generally worse than the Vulkan one. In some tests, D3D12 has not been able to deliver more than 75% of the Vulkan frames per second. In some other, D3D12 has been able to outperform Vulkan by a small margin. Performance improvements will be ironed out over time.
Expect it to come in Godot 4.3
I’m not keen on the specifics but part of the reason W4 exists is because the Godot Foundation can’t just pass around console SDKs. Only publishers and larger companies can use them and they’re usually under NDA.
So your options are going to a publisher like W4 Games (which is an entity by Godot’s founders) to handle that for you, or you can try porting it yourself and going through all the legal shenanigans.
What about homebrew games? I thought xbox had something like that.
You can turn on “dev mode” in your xbox console to be able to mess around with it and run homebrew, but that still doesn’t mean you’re allowed to publish your game to Xbox I don’t think.
Xbox dev mode lets you run UWP apps but you don’t get the Xbox SDK or the lower-level APIs, nor can you publish it without getting access to the SDKs first.
You can’t get access to the SDK without a license. A license takes moments to get but makes it so you can’t just pass it around. Unreal is the same way but they have plugins to add the SDK support for unreal