Vulkan API for DOOM is here

[zMeul]

source: https://community.bethesda.net/thread/54585

 

Quote

Vulkan is a revolutionary graphics and compute API technology developed by the Khronos Group that allows game developers to interact with graphics hardware at a lower level, allowing for more efficient use of hardware, improving game performance.
 
On DOOM, Vulkan allows PC users to experience significant performance boosts on supported GPUs and CPUs, translating directly to better gameplay feel.
 
Most users on the minimum spec end of hardware will experience better performance at higher video settings.  Users whose have recommended or above specs will experience exceptional performance with DOOM’s advanced video settings cranked up to full effect.
 
We’ll continue to work with AMD, NVIDIA and the Khronos Group to unlock the Vulkan API’s full potential through idTech 6, giving DOOM PC players a gameplay experience unlike anything else.

 

DOOM Vulkan support will be enabled via a patch that goes live on Steam at 10:00am ET on Monday, July 11^th, 2016. Vulkan will not run properly without updating to the latest unified drivers from AMD and NVIDIA for supported GPUs.

 

there are some caveats tho:

• Does DOOM support asynchronous compute when running on the Vulkan API?

Asynchronous compute is a feature that provides additional performance gains on top of the baseline id Tech 6 Vulkan feature set.
Currently asynchronous compute is only supported on AMD GPUs and requires DOOM Vulkan supported drivers to run.  We are working with NVIDIA to enable asynchronous compute in Vulkan on NVIDIA GPUs. We hope to have an update soon.

• DOOM crashes as soon as the game starts when running Vulkan on the NVIDIA  GTX 690.

The NVIDIA GTX 690 is not currently supported to run Vulkan on DOOM.  Users   with this GPU will need to run the game on OpenGL .

• DOOM crashes, is stuck on a black screen at launch or exhibits severe graphical corruption on supported NVIDIA GPUs that have 2GB VRAM when running Vulkan on Windows 7.

Vulkan is not currently supported on NVIDIA GPUs with 2 GB of RAM on Windows 7.  Users with these GPUs need to run DOOM on the OpenGL graphics AP

•  While running the Vulkan API, DOOM crashes when taking a screenshot using the Steam overlay on AMD GPUs.

This is a known issue with Vulkan API and AMD GPUs.

• The game may crash on some AMD GPUs when locking the computer.

This is a known issue while running DOOM on the Vulkan API.

• While running the Vulkan API on an NVIDIA GTX 970, strange black checkering or primarily black screens appear after changing resolution or display mode settings.

Graphical corruption may occur after resizing the game window while in windowed mode, and then switching the display mode from windowed to full screen.  If this occurs, restarting the game application should correct the issue.

• Windows 10 users running OpenGL or Vulkan on the AMD R9 Fury X and R9 390X at 1080p or higher may experience framerates below 60 FPS with Vertical Sync enabled.

While we are working on a fix for this with AMD, affected users should run the game with Vertical Sync disabled.

 

---

 

it appears that they've "ignored" adding the API to the demo, thus .. since I don't own the game, I'm unable to provide some benchmarks

it would've been interesting to see how my old Q9950 compares to the new i5 6500 in Vulkan, but you can see the differences in OpenGL here:

Spoiler

 

 

 

Edited July 12, 2016 by zMeul

[TidaLWaveZ]

Lol, why did they swap the color codes between graphs?

[zMeul]

15 minutes ago, TidaLWaveZ said:

Lol, why did they swap the color codes between graphs?

they who!? you mean me

I never noticed ....

 

there, I fixed it 

Edited July 11, 2016 by zMeul

[Darel321]

well.. now you see how much intel rly improved their cpu over the years.... every time its like 5% fasteeerr wooooo ............. same tech over and over... and smaller.. etc.... I'm not saying its bad.. but... yeah...

[zMeul]

4 minutes ago, Darel321 said:

well.. now you see how much intel rly improved their cpu over the years.... every time its like 5% fasteeerr wooooo ............. same tech over and over... and smaller.. etc.... I'm not saying its bad.. but... yeah...

in 7y it's like ~90% improvement, based on avg FPS

or roughly, 13% per year

[AlexGoesHigh]

2 minutes ago, Darel321 said:

well.. now you see how much intel rly improved their cpu over the years.... every time its like 5% fasteeerr wooooo ............. same tech over and over... and smaller.. etc.... I'm not saying its bad.. but... yeah...

its a q2q, all the bitching about small performance increases do so with sandy brige (second gen i series) and above, that's where benches show barely any changes

[Notional]

What happened to that magical async compute driver from NVidia? 

 

Again only AMD's architecture support it, but we don't know what consequence for performance it has yet. I cannot wait for the benches to arrive.

[VagabondWraith]

Why does nVidia not support ACE's in their hardware? Are they too stubborn or what? Doesn't Asynchronous Compute require much more power? Is nVidia afraid of supporting it after the Fermi debacle?

 

Surely nVidia could more efficiently implement Async than AMD could given their engineering and money. Idk, just confused...

[dalekphalm]

13 minutes ago, VagabondWraith said:

Why does nVidia not support ACE's in their hardware? Are they too stubborn or what? Doesn't Asynchronous Compute require much more power? Is nVidia afraid of supporting it after the Fermi debacle?

 

Surely nVidia could more efficiently implement Async than AMD could given their engineering and money. Idk, just confused...

Part of the problem is that a GPU architecture is in development for multiple years, and physical hardware of the GPU chip itself is more or less set in stone even a year before release, with only minor changes possible without large delays (eg: changing the amount of RAM).

So by the time Async-Compute became a "thing", Maxwell was long since done, and Pascal was already pretty heavily in development. I doubt they had time to implement ACE's fully in Pascal, or they made a guess that assumed Async-Compute wouldn't be a big deal.

 

I assume the next NVIDIA GPU architecture will have full Async-Compute support.

[DXMember]

still waiting on that Maxwell driver to enable ASync...

[Misanthrope]

1 hour ago, zMeul said:

• DOOM crashes, is stuck on a black screen at launch or exhibits severe graphical corruption on supported NVIDIA GPUs that have 2GB VRAM when running Vulkan on Windows 7.

Vulkan is not currently supported on NVIDIA GPUs with 2 GB of RAM on Windows 7.  Users with these GPUs need to run DOOM on the OpenGL graphics AP

That seems fairly significant and shitty, not just a growing pain.

[zMeul]

20 minutes ago, VagabondWraith said:

Why does nVidia not support ACE's in their hardware? Are they too stubborn or what? Doesn't Asynchronous Compute require much more power? Is nVidia afraid of supporting it after the Fermi debacle?

 

Surely nVidia could more efficiently implement Async than AMD could given their engineering and money. Idk, just confused...

for that exactly?

have you seen the pathetic increases from Async in Tomb Raider?

 

 

implementing dedicated HW cores solely to Async Compute is a waste in power over diminished returns

[Misanthrope]

1 minute ago, zMeul said:

for that exactly?

have you seen the pathetic increases from Async in Tomb Raider?

 

 

implementing dedicated HW cores solely to Async Compute is a waste in power over diminished returns

Is not that bad for Ashes, but not nearly as good as previously claimed. It's looking like it would only Help games that are heavily CPU bound and such.

[pinksnowmanshandle]

1 hour ago, AlexGoesHigh said:

its a q2q, all the bitching about small performance increases do so with sandy brige (second gen i series) and above, that's where benches show barely any changes

If it was a proportional 5% each generation, then that would be mean that Skylake is 20% better than Sandy Bridge. But I guess it's not leaps and bounds better but it's still noticeable.

[zMeul]

2 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

That seems fairly significant and shitty, not just a growing pain.

DX12 also requires much more VRAM than DX11 it was true back then and it holds true with Vulkan over OpenGL

the new APIs are much more VRAM hungry - I 1st noticed it with AMD's MANTLE API

[Misanthrope]

1 minute ago, zMeul said:

DX12 also requires much more VRAM than DX11 it was true back then and it holds true with Vulkan over OpenGL

the new APIs are much more VRAM hungry - I 1st noticed it with AMD's MANTLE API

True, yet why is it explicitly shown as a Windows 7 problem though? It's not like I care that much I have 8gb of vram myself

[zMeul]

2 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Is not that bad for Ashes, but not nearly as good as previously claimed. It's looking like it would only Help games that are heavily CPU bound and such.

it's per game and per scenario based increases - it's not like Async will provide % amount of perf increase in all situations

furthermore, it was a case with Fury X having a negative scaling with Ashes - in one of Anand's benches

 

Async was severely overhyped by AMD and people bought it

[zMeul]

3 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

True, yet why is it explicitly shown as a Windows 7 problem though? It's not like I care that much I have 8gb of vram myself

it's probably because of WDDM2 - WDDM2 has some memory management improvements that can't be implemented in W7

[Humbug]

Some early feedback from reddit users

 

Quote

 

OPENGL: UAC LOOKING AT FIRST GORE NEST - ~73FPS

VULKAN: UAC LOOKING AT FIRST GORE NEST - ~110 FPS

GPU: RADEON 390 8GB OC'ed @ 1070

CPU: i5 2500k @4.2GHz

EVERYTHING AT ULTRA SETTINGS 1080p

 

i5 6600k 4.5 16gb 2133 DDR4 GTX 970 SSC

Running at 2560x1080, all ultra settings with TSSAA

OpenGL would net me ~105 FPS average in and out of combat in most levels

Vulkan ran around 115-120 FPS average, no choppiness or other issues.

 

 

GTX 980, i7 3770K, 1080p ultra settings.

OpenGL gave me around 95-100 FPS at Kadingir Sanctum start area.

Restarted it after applying Vulkan API and now it says 140 FPS.

 

GTX1070 with current drivers, just a quick performance test on a random scene (1920x1080, everything maxed, no motion blur):

~110 fps with OpenGL

~130 fps with Vulkan

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/4sb529/doom_vulkan_support_for_pc_now_live/

[Misanthrope]

1 minute ago, zMeul said:

it's probably because of WDDM2 - WDDM2 has some memory management improvements that can't be implemented in W7

Oh ok.

 

Back on the main topic: This is good I hope this actually does takes off since it would mean the DX12 like features for OSes other than Windows 10: this doesn't means Linux but also people still on Windows 7 could benefit. It seems unlikely that Vulkan will become hugely popular but hopefully it will gain at least some traction.

[zMeul]

3 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

this doesn't means Linux

but of course it means Linux

and I really hope it will take off because I want Linux as a true alternative to Windows as a gaming platform

 

ps: I should be doing some Talos Principle Vulkan vs OpenGL vs DX11 in Win and Linux on my Skylake - did one on my Q9550 a while back

[Misanthrope]

3 minutes ago, zMeul said:

but of course it means Linux

and I really hope it will take off because I want Linux as a true alternative to Windows as a gaming platform

I meant not only. By the way is Doom coming or available on Linux? I think virtually every id game in the past has been but not sure under Beth

[Humbug]

5 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

I meant not only. By the way is Doom coming or available on Linux? I think virtually every id game in the past has been but not sure under Beth

Their old renderer was based on openGL. So if they wanted to bring it to Linux they could have done so with less effort than other studios who port from directX. Same goes for their previous game Rage.

So Vulkan doesn't really change anything for them as far as bringing the game to Linux is concerned. Their interest in Vulkan is probably to serve their windows users better. Begin the move away from openGL and towards the new gen APIs.

[zMeul]

5 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

I meant not only. By the way is Doom coming or available on Linux? I think virtually every id game in the past has been but not sure under Beth

doubt it, they use Denuvo DRM

[Notional]

12 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Oh ok.

 

Back on the main topic: This is good I hope this actually does takes off since it would mean the DX12 like features for OSes other than Windows 10: this doesn't means Linux but also people still on Windows 7 could benefit. It seems unlikely that Vulkan will become hugely popular but hopefully it will gain at least some traction.

Windows 7 is 6 years old. Let it go. Let it die in peace already. Windows 10 is better at Vulkan than W7 due to WDDM 2.0 alone. Then there's DX12 as well.