I downloaded the demo to see if it will run with my ancient CPU, and surprisingly it runs fantastic. But only on OpenGL. When I tried to switch to Vulkan, the game will not even load. I instantly get a crash report. Anyone have any idea why? I've been searching on Google, but can't seem to find any answer to why this happens. Could it be just the demo? I'll probably buy it anyways, because it is on sale for $20 and runs great in OpenGL and I finally have a GPU that can handle it.
I suspect your ancient CPU is the culprit with Vulkan. I know it does some load balancing stuff between the CPU and GPU and it may have no idea what to do with something that old. Go ahead and get the game. You won't regret it. It's among the best single player FPSs I've played. It's a perfect example of how to revive a dormant franchise. It stays true to its roots but feels new at the same time. 9/10 IMO.
That seems odd. According to this Vulcan should eliminate the CPU bottleneck. https://www.eteknix.com/doom-opengl-vs-vulkan-graphics-performance-analysis/
Hawk is using a CPU from like 2005 or 2006 IIRC. I suspect Vulkan is not designed for something that old.
Its a tri-core Phenom II, so its ONLY eight years old From what I read after my post, it seems this was an issue at launch that was resolved in a patch. People think the demo was never patched. I'm actually about to test it. I bought the game and I let all 80GB of it download last night. If Vulkan works, I can actually test how much work Vulkan takes off of a CPU. To say I have a bottleneck is an understatement. And if it doesn't work, I already know I can run it in OpenGL. Plus I'll probably finally gut my tower for new hardware by the end of the year anyways. I'm putting my PS4 up for sale for soem of the upgrade cash, I'm over it.
WOW. Not only is Vulkan working in the full game, but its a visibly noticeable difference. Later I'll actually try to get some real data, but there has been a visible increase is FPS.
So this is the effect Vulkan has on an old CPU. (Phenom II X3 with an RX 480 GPU.) OpenGL = 45-50 FPS average Vulkan = 100-110 FPS average What an improvement! I did not expect that type of impact. There really needs to be more games taking advantage of this. The game looks better and plays smoother. My CPU is still a significant bottleneck, but in this game now, it seems negligible. The only time my hardware has struggled so far is when I got my first Argent Cell, the upgrade menu dropped to 15 FPS. No idea why, because nothing was really happening except an overlay.
Vulkan always sounds amazing but I guess the extra effort it takes to use it is holding it back. DirectX has been around forever and developers know it well. One advantage that Vulkan has is its cross-platform support. It runs on Windows, Linux, Android, and Nintendo Switch. It may take several years but it will catch on eventually.
Glad to hear he got it working. Hawk's setup is exactly the kind of thing Vulkan was designed for. The difference with old CPUs can be huge. With newer, more powerful CPUs, not so much.
Th gains I had from switching graphics API seem way higher than what is typically reported in benchmarking, but I think that just proves how much of an issue my CPU was when running OpenGL. All things considered, this game is extremely well optimized.
Well, if you're interested in conspiracy theories, Mantle, Vulcan, and DX12 are all APIs that benefit AMD a lot. Typically AMD will see 5% to 15% performance boost with any of those while Nvidia doesn't really receive any kind of benefit. It seems like the longer DX11 stays around the better it is for Nvidia. Additionally, I think Nvidia would prefer to control performance through drivers because that allows them to decide when hardware becomes obsolete. If left to developers they could, in theory, keep optimising for a GTX 970 much longer than Nvidia would like.