State of Roblox graphics API across all platforms, with deltas since EOY 2016. Updated December 11 2017.
Windows
| API | Share |
|---|---|
| Direct3D 11+ | 77% (+6%) |
| Direct3D 10.1 | 11% (-3%) |
| Direct3D 10.0 | 9% (-2%) |
| Direct3D 9 | 3% (-1%) |
Despite my hope for the contrary, D3D9 doesn't seem to be going anywhere :( Or rather it does seem to be declining in usage but does so rather slowly. Overall no major changes in the market, people are slowly getting new hardware.
Since this question comes up a lot, around a third of D3D9 users come from Windows XP; everybody else can't run D3D10 because their GPUs are too old.
Windows Store
| API | Share |
|---|---|
| Direct3D 11+ | 90% (+3%) |
| Direct3D 10.1 | 6% (-2%) |
| Direct3D 10.0 | 4% (-1%) |
If you are shipping a Win10 store build to a casual audience you still need to support D3D10!
Note: we don't support D3D9 feature level on Windows Store so I don't know how many D3D9 users are there - but the entire market is shifted more towards D3D11 from what it looks like, so my guess is <1%.
Xbox One
| API | Share |
|---|---|
| Direct3D 11 | 100% |
Surprise! :D We don't use D3D12 on Xbox One - maybe one day.
MacOS
| API | Share |
|---|---|
| Metal | 52% (+52%) |
| OpenGL 4.1 | 28% (-50%) |
| OpenGL 3.3 | 16% (-1%) |
| OpenGL 2.1 | 4% (-1%) |
We now support Metal on OSX which around half of our Mac users can run. It looks like low-end systems are not really going anywhere on Mac either, and the market seems more stagnant compared to Windows; sign of lackluster laptop offering in 2017?
iOS
| API | Share |
|---|---|
| Metal | 86% (+30%) |
| OpenGL ES 3.0 | 1% (-19%) |
| OpenGL ES 2.0 | 13% (-11%) |
The major change since last year is that we now support Metal on iOS 9 & 10. We don't support Metal on iOS 8, so we still have some OpenGL ES 3.0 devices - their market share is below 1% and slowly declining.
Note that the share of ES 2.0 devices is also dropping steadily due to hardware upgrades; in general iOS is the market with the highest rate of change. It will be interesting to see how quickly the remaining OpenGL ES 2.0 devices will retire.
Android
| API | Share |
|---|---|
| OpenGL ES 3.2 | 16% (+12%) |
| OpenGL ES 3.1 | 22% |
| OpenGL ES 3.0 | 36% (-10%) |
| OpenGL ES 2.0 | 25% (-3%) |
| Vulkan | 1% (+1%) |
We have shipped Vulkan implementation on Android 7.1 and later operating systems; unfortunately, the market share is very small, which reflects the overall trends in terms of OS upgrades on Android. We encountered some driver bugs on Android 7.0 which we will work around in January next year; we expect that when we get Android 7.0, Vulkan market share will rise to 10-15%.
Otherwise the high end devices are getting replaced by even higher end devices, with ES 2.0 market share reasonably stable, unfortunately.