Frostbite Already Supports DX12, Says DICE Technical Director

Many enthusiast gamers have been wondering whether Frostbite (DICE’s own engine that is now used by most studios inside Electronic Arts) would get support for DirectX 12 soon, and now an official confirmation has been provided by Technical Director Stefan Boberg via Twitter.

The Frostbite engine already supports DX12, apparently.

This isn’t a huge surprise. In fact, DICE worked closely with AMD in order to promote Mantle, the forerunner low level API that paved the way for Microsoft’s DirectX 12 and Khronos’ Vulkan.

Since Battlefield 4, all game releases that used Frostbite also featured support for Mantle, though the biggest performance benefits were found in Battlefield 4 itself.

Now the big question is: which Frostbite game will be the first one to support DirectX 12? Battlefield 5 (or whatever it will be called) seems an obvious candidate, of course. We know that a new Battlefield will be released in Q3/Q4 2016 and the chances that it will be DX12 ready are extremely high.

Holiday 2016 games made with Frostbite might have DX12 as minimum spec

However, there are other candidates as well. Mass Effect 4 is also planned to launch in Q4 2016, and depending on release schedule this could be earlier or later than the next Battlefield.

But there are Frostbite games being released very soon. Need for Speed, for instance, launching on November 3; Star Wars: Battlefront, scheduled for November 17, exactly two weeks later; finally, Mirror’s Edge Catalyst which debuts on February 23.

We know that Johan Anderson, another Technical Director at DICE, was already pushing for Windows 10 and DX12 as a minimum spec for the games coming in late 2016. Perhaps the impressive figures that pinpoint Windows 10 installations at over 81 million (with an average of 400K installations per day since launch) will push forward internal plans at EA and even this year’s games will support DirectX 12.