Vulkan - new generation cross platform graphics and GPGPU computing API

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I love how Microsoft has been put into its place as far as PC gaming goes. PC gaming was Microsoft's neglected platform, which rarely received any love. Microsoft basically had a monopoly on PC gaming because of DirectX and Windows, and they didn't see why they should improve their platform with no competition around.

As soon as Vulcan proved to be a viable option that pushed for openness and support of other operating systems such as Linux, we see Microsoft showing respect and throwing love at PC gamers. Better updates that prevent BSODs, making their exclusive games available not just on the Xbox platform but also on the PC platform, Xbox and Windows crossplay, and so forth.

This will also shake up Nvidia, and some of their shady business practices. Don't get me wrong all my cards have been Nvidia to this day, so I'm not being biased. Some of these shady practices include older cards dying from driver updates, which I've experienced first hand. My 580 was doing just fine until one of the updates hit, and my card died a few days after the update and many other people had experienced the same issue. The practice of overpricing their cards and releasing the Ti versions after consumers had spend so much money on the 80s should also be revised. I know AMD hasn't been perfect either, but I feel like these two companies can push each other through competition to better their products and support.

Competition is always good for the consumers, and I feel like Microsoft and Nvidia have competition now after a long time.
 
Yeah. PCGH.de writes: vulkan eruption on Fiji. +50% on a R9 Nano paired with a FX 8350 in 4k/max details. ^^

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Doom-...Patch-bessere-Performance-Benchmarks-1201321/
Impressive. But to be fair, much of that performance boost is probably due to the weak CPU as well.

Here's a similar story with an Nvidia card.

http://www.forum-3dcenter.org/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=11098171&postcount=1084

I don't really suffer from CPU bottlenecks with my OC'd 4790K..
 
Yeah, Nvidia card owners can profit when they have a fast card and a relatively slow CPU. For AMD cards we see improvements both in CPU- and GPU-limited scenarios, which is more or less to be expected, since their OpenGL driver performance is simply most of the time not very good.
With Vulkan AMD cards are giving the Geforces a run for their money.
 
Devilish wins, 66(,6 maybe? ;) ) % on Fury X @ 1080p, 52% @ 1440p, still 11% @ 4k. Beats the GTX 1070 by a stretch.

 
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It also means a lot depends on the application. Those which use parallelism properly, will probably benefit from AMD more.

Also, Vulkan prevents all kind of shenanigans that are common in non direct stateful APIs (where both AMD and Nvidia are known to take shortcuts outside of the standard to "optimize" their OpenGL / DX implementations for particular applications). Nvidia got better in that shenanigans game. Hopefuly with Vulkan this will become a non issue.
 
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http://www.dsogaming.com/news/id-software-async-compute-will-major-factor-engines-across-platforms/

id Software also claimed that developers should adopt Vulkan as soon as possible.

“There is definitely a learning curve, but the benefits are obvious.” said Axel Gnetting and continued.

“Vulkan actually has pretty decent tools support with RenderDoc already and the debugging layers are really useful by now. The big benefit of Vulkan is that shader compiler, debug layers and RenderDoc are all open source. Additionally, it has full support for Windows 7, so there is no downside in OS support either compared to DX12.”
 
Vulkan is terrible right now.

DOOM FPS is dropping all over the place and freezing I tried it on a Nvidia GTX 780ti, a AMD 4 core processor, and 16GB's of DDR 3 RAM. Then I tried it on a Nvidia GTX 960, AMD 4 core processor, and 16GB's of DDR3 RAM. Then I tried it on a Nvidia GTX 1060, AMD 4 core processor, and 16GB's of DDR3 RAM. Then I tried it on a AMD Radeon 5570, AMD 4 core processor, and 16GB's of DDR3 RAM. Last I tried all of those combinations with a Intel Core i7-3930K Processor and the same thing.

Both OpenGL and Vulkan also give me black beams or white beams, not so noticable though, while PC versions of video games with DirectX support I don't have this problem at all.

Nvidia GTX 470 for DOOM both OpenGL and Vulkan doesn't even work it freezes at the main menu.

I have all of the latest updated graphic drivers for both OpenGL and Vulkan and it's terrible.

I made a topic on the Bethesda Softworks Bethesda.net forums for DOOM hoping iD Software also adds support for both DirectX 11 and DirectX 12.

I'm not the only PC gamer having problems with Vulkan in the PC version of DOOM.

I don't even know why the person who gifted me DOOM gifted it to me when I haven't purchased a single PC version of a video game from Steam since 2012. Oh well.
 
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@Balloers100: So how did Bethesda explain your "white beams"?

What Nvidia driver did you use btw? And for the reference, GTX 470 doesn't support Vulkan. There is no need for them to bother with DX. If there are bugs with the drivers, they should report them.
 
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From the DOOM benchmarks I have seen (maybe patches have improved the performance since then), it looks like Vulkan is most beneficial on AMD GPUs, and to a smaller extent on the GTX 10xx (Pascal) series. On Maxwell, it is an improvement only in CPU limited situations, otherwise the performance stays about the same, and on Kepler it is slower than OpenGL. But this is with a beta version of the renderer, it probably still has room for improvement.
 
@sv3672 Many people think that the reason for that is AMD's OpenGL and DX11 driver performance is horrid and it's not able to bring the raw computational power potential to the games. The difference of Vulkan is that their drivers are already pretty good for it, since it is basically their Mantle. That's why we are seeing huge improvements on AMD cards. Of course another reason would be that AMD supports Async compute on hardware level and Nvidia only has a software solution on Pascal (and nothing on Maxwell). But the main reason is probably the driver situation. Basically, we were not able to use the AMD cards properly before, and only now we are seeing fair comparison between hardware :)
 
^ This is more or less accurate. Only AMD's Vulkan/DX12 performance is not due to their good drivers for those APIs, but rather due to the fact that drivers do a lot less and therefore have vastly less influence on the performance in those new lower level APIs. Where huge gains are seen it's due to driver problems with DX11/OpenGL though. Support for async compute gives an additional 10-15% boost in some cases where it is used, but the main improvement stems from finally getting rid of driver-related bottlenecks.
 
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