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
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usernametaken76 - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I can confirm a 1080 is overkill at 1080p with Vulkan. A 1070 is seeing 200 fps at 1080p/Ultra. At nightmare it only drops down to the 160s.just4U - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I confess I haven't kept up on such things.. but I wasn't even aware that Doom was a thing of interest anymore.bill.rookard - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
They're not talking 1990's era Doom which fit on a floppy disk or two... They mean the latest release (reboot?)...HollyDOL - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
More important... can you still outrun your own rocket? :-)ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
LOL, are you quite literally living under a rock :)xemorc - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
By guru3d it's around 20 per cent gain for 2k, while zero gain for 1080.xemorc - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
20 % gain for rx 480 in 2k i meantddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
Not too shaby, I was expecting ~30% in real life situations (not tech demos designed to showcase it).Still at 20% improvement, that reduces the advantage for the 1070 from 60 to 30%. Considering in the local retailer the 1070 is 70% more expensive, the RX480 definitely increases in value when it comes to next-gen titles.
tipoo - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
"though the company says it's working with Nvidia to bring async compute features to the green team's graphics cards, too."Now, Pascal only, or "we swear it's coming in the drivers HEY LOOK PASCAL" Maxwell?
Stochastic - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
I'm very curious how Nvidia is going to implement async compute. This seems to be the one big advantage AMD has over Nvidia at the moment.