What exactly makes Vulkan better than DirectX?

[Tomsta]

I don't understand what exactly is it that makes Vulkan (arguably) better for games than DirectX, is it more how it handles codes and instructions? I know few games use Vulkan, I only know of 3; Doom, Path of Exile and Baulder's Gate 3 (early access)

[Dedayog]

From what I understand it has to do with driver overhead, Vulkan has less and can execute faster.
 

That's as far as I know, I am sure there are wiki or other articles out there concerning.

[jaslion]

11 minutes ago, Dedayog said:

From what I understand it has to do with driver overhead, Vulkan has less and can execute faster.
 

That's as far as I know, I am sure there are wiki or other articles out there concerning.

The main point for vulkan is how it does not rely on the one core does most/all principle. It is built around spreading tasks around on every core something which dx11 can totally do but needs a lot of help and forcing. Also due to less overhead and the way it's developed you can get away with so many more drawcalls.

 

Best way to really explain is.

 

On dx11 you have 1000 npcs walking around doing their ai behavior. Core 1 has to offload the ai, movement systems, audio,... to other cores AND still has to feed the gpu the data that it cannot offload to other cores thus the game runs poorly. It may also reach the drawcall limit that dx can handle and by just adding 1 more npc the framerate could go from 70fps to 40.

 

Vulkan and dx12 give much lower level access allowing many things dx11 cannot do. They are also focused on using all the cores and avoiding the 1 core instructs all way of thinking this way you avoid bottlenecks. They also have a much higher drawcall limit and can handle much more on screen.

 

This is very simplified and inaccurate but a rough thing of what would be a main difference.

[Tomsta]

8 minutes ago, jaslion said:

The main point for vulkan is how it does not rely on the one core does most/all principle. It is built around spreading tasks around on every core something which dx11 can totally do but needs a lot of help and forcing. Also due to less overhead and the way it's developed you can get away with so many more drawcalls.

 

Best way to really explain is.

 

On dx11 you have 1000 npcs walking around doing their ai behavior. Core 1 has to offload the ai, movement systems, audio,... to other cores AND still has to feed the gpu the data that it cannot offload to other cores thus the game runs poorly. It may also reach the drawcall limit that dx can handle and by just adding 1 more npc the framerate could go from 70fps to 40.

 

Vulkan and dx12 give much lower level access allowing many things dx11 cannot do. They are also focused on using all the cores and avoiding the 1 core instructs all way of thinking this way you avoid bottlenecks. They also have a much higher drawcall limit and can handle much more on screen.

 

This is very simplified and inaccurate but a rough thing of what would be a main difference.

Basically means that the individual cores of a CPU are being stressed less? allowing for more complex instructions to be run?

[jaslion]

3 minutes ago, Tomsta said:

Basically means that the individual cores of a CPU are being stressed less? allowing for more complex instructions to be run?

That and more direct communication with the gpu. Also allows the cpu to do more before feeding it to the gpu thus lowering the load a bit.

[Mark Kaine]

Ok and if it's so great why is almost no one using it?

 

 

[PlayStation 2]

2 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

Ok and if it's so great why is almost no one using it?

 

 

Part of it is general compatibility, part of it is legacy shit that would need to be rewritten to take advantage of Vulkan and part of it is just that it may not be necessary. 

Vulkan adoption hasn't been too bad, but it hasn't been as explosive as I kinda expected it to be, but at the same time, DirectX 12 adoption has been really slow, too. It'll take a while before either of these become APIs of choice, but as another console generation looms upon us, that time might be coming very soon.

[Mark Kaine]

6 hours ago, handymanshandle said:

Part of it is general compatibility, part of it is legacy shit that would need to be rewritten to take advantage of Vulkan and part of it is just that it may not be necessary. 

Vulkan adoption hasn't been too bad, but it hasn't been as explosive as I kinda expected it to be, but at the same time, DirectX 12 adoption has been really slow, too. It'll take a while before either of these become APIs of choice, but as another console generation looms upon us, that time might be coming very soon.

I see, well yeah it's not exactly widespread so far.

 

Also I'm extra wary about something like this because the highly praised (shilled) "DX12" yields worse performance over DX11 in *any* case I've tested. Most games become actually "unplayable" with DX12 enabled , a glitchy buggy mess...

 

(on two different machines no less, so I kinda doubt it's a driver / settings issue... )

 

But thanks for the info, some of these reasons I anticipated to be the case.  

[Alive]

8 hours ago, handymanshandle said:

 

Vulkan adoption hasn't been too bad, but it hasn't been as explosive as I kinda expected it to be, but at the same time, DirectX 12 adoption has been really slow, too.

 

I'm incrusting myself here just by curiosity: 
Might that be due to the lack of adoption of Windows 10 ?
I don't know if it's totally true, but back when there were discussion about the end of Windows 7 support, I've heard a lot of people were still on W7 and previous version, and even after its end of support, data showed a lot of people remaining on Windows 7 still. 

Again maybe that was exaggerated or amplified by the Enterprise side of it, but I was wondering this while reading your post. 

[Lord Vile]

16 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

I see, well yeah it's not exactly widespread so far.

 

Also I'm extra wary about something like this because the highly praised (shilled) "DX12" yields worse performance over DX11 in *any* case I've tested. Most games become actually "unplayable" with DX12 enabled , a glitchy buggy mess...

 

(on two different machines no less, so I kinda doubt it's a driver / settings issue... )

 

But thanks for the info, some of these reasons I anticipated to be the case.  

Depends on the GPUs too. The 1000 series didn't have great async compute support and therefore perform worse in DX12. 

[Mark Kaine]

4 hours ago, Lord Vile said:

Depends on the GPUs too. The 1000 series didn't have great async compute support and therefore perform worse in DX12. 

It's just funny when I read "reviews" dx12 is almost always better, when I read user experience dx12 is almost always worse.............. 

 

 

 

 

And Vulkan is probably about the same thing except there are about 2 games that are running better on it. Which proves exactly nothing. 

 

 

But yes the fact that reviews say 12 is "better" (on 1000 series cards, cause they 'tested' it) when in reality it isn't makes me avoid the the thing hard, besides my own experience of course that dx12 never performs better and usually is 'unplayable mess' 

 

 

I think it's Microsofts biggest failure and of course they're desperate to 'make it happen' I sure hope they don't succeed tho (devs seem to hate it too) 

 

 

 

[Harry Voyager]

As I understand it, it's generally harder to code for something that's executing in parallel than something running sequentially, and if you can get enough performance using the sequential version, there's not much advantage in taking the time and effort to make it parallel. 

 

The main success story I'm familiar with from the Dx11 to Vulkan migration was X-Plane's move. Flight sims tend to be *very* cpu heavy, and have a *massive* number of polygons on screen at one time.

 

Once they finally got all the bugs worked out you pretty much jumped from 30fps to 60fps in most scenarios. And I think that's down to Vulkan being able to support something like 15 times the number of draw calls per second that DX11 can. 

 

But, if you're already running Fallen Order at 60fps in 4k on Dx11, that just doesn't matter to you.