That's correct. However, to be more precise, we never said Render To Texture is not possible in DirectX 12, the reasons why we haven't converted our DirectX 11 code are several:
- DirectX 12 in way more complex than DirectX 11 ever was, and it requires developers to take responsibility of VRAM memory handling, which was previously made by the DirectX system itself in coordination with the video driver. P3D V5 is still not 100% as stable in the video driver handling as P3D V4 ever was, and we didn't want to risk adding another potentially dangerous code to it.
- We used Render to Texture to do mainly two things: custom textures and dynamic font rendering, used in some displays and the jetway numbers. Most users missed the custom operator logos, so we tried to mitigate this by adding hundreds of new liveries to GSX, so it would be less likely you'd need extra ones, but the issue with font rendering is that we used an Open Source library to do font rendering that is not available in Direct X 12, because Direct X lacks the core feature ( DirectWrite ) which makes this possible, so this library wasn't ported to DX12. Using DirectWrite with DirectX 12 is technically possible, but it requires to mix DirectX 11 and 12 on the same rendering context, which increases complexity, thus the likeness of issues even further, and it increases VRAM consumption too, which is risky to do in DirectX 12 and P3D, which is already on the borderline of crashing, if you have a complex airplane over a dense airport and a video card with "only" 8GB, which are the most common, by far.
- Then there's the big elephant in the room which is MSFS, which came after P3D V5. Since MSFS doesn't have any kind of Render to Texture ability, and it's very unlikely it will ever get it, we had to move away from custom RTT liveries and True type font rendering in any case, so in order to keep supporting P3D, we decided to continue on GSX in the assumption Render To Texture would remain a P3D4-only feature.
Something from MSFS will eventually come back in P3D too in the future, since we added alternative ways to have some kind of dynamic text in MSFS (in a way that is compatible with P3D5 too ), we might see some of the old features from V4 coming back to V5. I'm not sure abut Jetways numbers, but it's surely something we'll like to have in MSFS, so we'll look again into them after the first release for MSFS.
