Doom Vulkan Patch Released
by Ryan Smith on July 11, 2016 10:30 AM EST
Bethesda PR has sent over a quick note this morning that the long-awaited Vulkan patch for Doom is now available, allowing the game to be played with either the OpenGL or Vulkan rendering backends. With this release – and although the distinction is somewhat arbitrary – Doom has become the first performance-intensive game released to use Khronos’s new low-level API, and arguably the first game where the rendering path is being implemented for performance reasons rather than proof-of-concept reasons (as was the case with The Talos Principle).
Notably, id is not calling this a beta release, and the Vulkan rendering path is otherwise not hidden. In a full announcement from id’s Robert Duffy, id notes that via the Vulkan rendering path “we also anticipate some older GPUs will now be able to play the game at good framerates.” Though at the same time it should be mentioned that when it comes to older cards, id is specifically recommending against using Vulkan under Windows 7 with 2GB NVIDIA cards, which rules out some early Kepler cards.
The full FAQ for the patch release can be found over on Bethesda’s forums. Meanwhile the patch itself will be distributed as a Steam update, and gamers will want to be sure to grab the latest AMD or NVIDIA drivers for use with the game.
Source: Bethesda
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
73 Comments
View All Comments
ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
You obviously have no idea that the draw calls bottleneck has long been the N1 problem with computer graphics. With Vulkan and DX12 on the stage, the advantage of consoles will be pretty much diminished.Vulkan allows to throw much, MUCH more drawing calls at the GPU, you get MUCH less work on the CPU and much better utilization of hardware on the GPU. Besides games are not all graphics, and prior to Vulkan it often happens that you waste too much CPU time on issuing the drawing calls and you delay stuff like sound, physics, ai or whatever - so gaming experience still sucks.
"The 1920x1080pixel display delivered 50-55fps results running on OpenGL, running on a id Software dev machine with a GeForce GTX 1080 handling graphics. The demo, though, ranged between 120 and 200fps once Vulkan was enabled, and remained above 120fps"
As this demo indicates, nvidia hardware got from 50-55 FPS to 120-200 FPS, that's like 350% better, so do go ahead and take your spoiler somewhere it won't embarrass you ;)
SlyNine - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
The performance increase is not that dramatic or anywhere close. After running volkan I can say it's probably around 5-10% on my system at 1440p. (I7-5820 at 4.2, 32gigs of ram, 980GTX) There was an improvement, but it's hard to say how much.ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Well, that's a 980GTX - it is last gen hardware. It doesn't benefit from DX12 either, in fact it actually loses performance in AOS. The figures in the above post are from a LIVE DEMO, doubt they would go about lying about it.And its Vulkan, right there up in the article title ;)
SlyNine - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Lol, I'll belive it when i see it...YukaKun - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Well, with your 980 you won't :PCheers!
SlyNine - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Actually i will, it's quit the paradox that you're unaware of benchmarking sitesYukaKun - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
Oh, my bad. I thought you were implying "first hand".Cheers!
jwcalla - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I see somebody bought the marketing hype.Geranium - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
ACE will free lots of CPU cycle and developer can use those free CPU cycle to do other works like more character or do other things.araczynski - Thursday, July 21, 2016 - link
lol, not that it'll benefit them, but the majority (~70% of pc gamers are rocking graphics cards with 2gb or less of vram and similarly 'dated' video cards. i'd wager people don't buy high end cpus and then turn around and pair them up with mid/low range gpu's.so your "only" statement is applicable to a tiny bubble of the market.