DOOM gets awaited Vulkan patch/Performance greater than OpenGL

[Chazore]

id Software has just released a new patch for DOOM that adds support for Vulkan. Naturally, we went ahead and tested some scenes that were performing poorly under OpenGL 4.5. And we are happy to report that id Software has nailed it as DOOM runs way, way, way better under the Vulkan API. 

As we wrote in our PC Performance Analysis, there were some scenes in DOOM during which our GPU usage was dropping for no apparent reasons.

“Now while DOOM runs exceptionally well on the PC, we did notice some optimization issues (that could be very well due to the OpenGL API). As we can see in the following screenshot, our GPU was underused for no apparent reason. In this scene – and other outdoor scenes – our GTX980Ti was not used to its fullest, even though we were not VRAM or CPU limited. Yes, we were still above 90-100fps, however it appears that the game does not fully utilize the GPU in specific scenes. It will be interesting to see whether these scenes run better with Vulkan.”

As you can see, that scene ran with 100fps in OpenGL 4.5. Well, that same scene ran with 160fps in Vulkan. Yeap, we’re talking about a 60fps performance boost, which sounds unbelievable.

Not only that, but the game is now able to “properly” scale on multiple CPU cores. Below you can see the CPU scaling of our Intel i7 4930K on both OpenGL 4.5 and Vulkan. As you can see, Vulkan was able to take advantage of all of our six CPU cores. On the other hand, and while the game scaled on our hexa-core under OpenGL 4.5, it relied mostly on a single CPU core.

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All in all, DOOM runs incredibly well under Vulkan. All of the optimizations issues that we reported in our PC Performance Analysis are now fixed thanks to it, so kudos to id Software.

 

So how about them performance gains eh?. Seems to me like id were keen on getting that patch out as soon as they finished talking about it's benefits from last week's news: http://gamingbolt.com/id-software-dev-puzzled-by-devs-choosing-dx12-over-vulkan-claims-xbox-one-dx12-is-different-than-pc

Although it's working for AMD, id are also working with Nvidia to get it running as soon as. I imagine sometime either this week or enxt is when Nvidia will likely have a driver out by then with the needed support. I've already completed DOOM's SP and I have no desire to play the MP, though once the driver rolls out I might start from scratch again just to see the perf gains on my 980.

All in all I'm happy that they managed to make it work out for themselves in the end rather than it coming out borked to hell and doing worse than DX 12. I only hope now that Bethesda take this as a sign that id can do things right and maybe even start supporting other Bethesda titles with Vulkan as all other OS's will benefit from the API rather than slapping DX 12 and only supporting WIn 10 while shutting everyone else out. 

News source: http://www.dsogaming.com/news/doom-benefits-greatly-vulkan-vulkan-versus-opengl-performance-comparison/