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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ddriver - Monday, July 11, 2016 - link
My bet is they will implement it in software, it will show as supported but without the actual hardware underneath won't result in gains.yannigr2 - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
Dynamic load balancing on Pascal is what probably they where promising for Maxwell. But they thought that it will be better to show it as a feature for Pascal, than give it for free to the Maxwell users. And many where convince to pay the ridiculous Pascal prices thinking that Pascal comes with async compute. One more win for Nvidia's marketing department. Looking of course at Doom benchmarks, it is just a useless marketing feature for games.pencea - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
Sooo where are the reviews of the GTX 1070, GTX 1080, & 480x that you said you'll follow up soon after those cards were launched?powerarmour - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
Down the toilet, like this site.DonMiguel85 - Tuesday, July 12, 2016 - link
I'm still waiting on the GTX 960 review myselfdamianrobertjones - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
I don't actually see an option NOT to install this when updating or installing the nVidia driver? That's a bit naughty and just another pile of crap to remove. Why oh why do they do this!?xenol - Wednesday, July 13, 2016 - link
If it wasn't for consoles in the first place, a lot of graphical features and optimizations wouldn't have happened as they do now. In fact, a lot of these nice features we take for granted had their start on a console.Besides that, consoles going away won't make game developers suddenly target high-end PCs. They'll target lower end PCs to maximize their market base.
ASEdouardD - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Yeah. Sitting here with my 970, I have a feeling my next GPU won't be from NVIDIA. Probably getting a Vulcan based card when they come out unless they have some major unexpected flaw. All this dx12, async compute, Vulcan stuff really makes me worry something like the 1070 will become obsolete way too fast.ASEdouardD - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
VEGA, not Vulcan of course. Duh.xenol - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link
Asynchronous compute is solving a problem that AMD and NVIDIA tackle in different ways. AMD uses a hardware scheduler. NVIDIA uses a software one. There's nothing wrong with either solution.If Vega cleansweeps Pascal in DX12/Vulkan games that make heavy use of async compute, then we can start pointing fingers at NVIDIA.