Wednesday, July 13th 2016

DOOM with Vulkan Renderer Significantly Faster on AMD GPUs
Over the weekend, Bethesda shipped the much awaited update to "DOOM" which can now take advantage of the Vulkan API. A performance investigation by ComputerBase.de comparing the game's Vulkan renderer to its default OpenGL renderer reveals that Vulkan benefits AMD GPUs far more than it does to NVIDIA ones. At 2560 x 1440, an AMD Radeon R9 Fury X with Vulkan is 25 percent faster than a GeForce GTX 1070 with Vulkan. The R9 Fury X is 15 percent slower than the GTX 1070 with OpenGL renderer on both GPUs. Vulkan increases the R9 Fury X frame-rates over OpenGL by a staggering 52 percent! Similar performance trends were noted with 1080p. Find the review in the link below.
Source:
ComputerBase.de
200 Comments on DOOM with Vulkan Renderer Significantly Faster on AMD GPUs
Developers know that the future is low level APIs. And they know that Vulkan could be very crucial in the future giving them the opportunity to make a game not just for consoles and desktops, but for every device out there, including smartphones and tablets. Also Vulkan is the only option right now if you want to offer a game highly optimized in Windows 7 and Linux. Going DirectX 12 means that only users with Windows 10 will see any benefits and going DirectX 11 only is like putting your head in the sand hopping that everyone else will do the same.
Edit: My takeaway... I skip this round of GPUs and await the next generation.
If something went on behind the scenes, it can only be said as conjecture. Let's not just spout conjecture as fact. It makes me pissy... and when I'm pissy, it makes me do stupid things, like break my computer.
You wouldn't cause an innocent frog to break his computer, right?
However, yes, Vulkan exists for a reason, it does put more flexibility into the hands of the developer.
Exciting times for sure, after being stuck with 28nm cards since forever.
Edit: I may not skip this generation, my 660Ti starts to show its age. And I say "may" because the 480 doesn't cut it for me. 1060 I think will provide enough HP, but I won't buy it at FE+ prices.
Unlike DX11 where Nvidia ruled and RTG needed to optimise drivers heavily (why after time they improve performance because they need the optimisations), RTG have a clear edge.
Is the Async hardware really proprietary though? If it is, Nvidia can't do anything about DX12. Also, if Mantle, Vulcan and DX12 is based heavily on proprietary tech, is that 'allowed' under FRAND patents?
Was refreshing the site for further updates and clicked on a link which I thought to be an update because of the use of the word "final". My appologies! Yup. I wonder if dynamic load balancing coupled with pre-emption will boast a similar performance gain as async compute does (unlikely imho).