Tag Archives: DOOM

Watch AMD Vega Run DOOM On Vulkan!

AMD recently revealed architectural details of the upcoming Vega GPU, but many people were disappointed that AMD is not ready to launch it yet. Will it matter how fantastic AMD Vega is on paper if it’s nowhere close to reality? The good news is AMD appears to be close to the final silicon.

In fact, at the AMD Tech Summit in Sonoma, we were shown an AMD Vega prototype running DOOM on Vulkan. Billy Khan from id Software also came to vouch for the performance and stability of the latest Vega silicon.

 

Watch AMD Vega Run DOOM On Vulkan!

AMD showed off this Vega prototype running DOOM at the 4K resolution of 3840 x 2160, using the Ultra Quality preset. DOOM was running with the Vulkan upgrade, of course, which allows for asynchronous compute. The video shows the Vega prototype deliver frame rates of 60-70 fps, with an average of 65 fps.

We tried to take a closer look inside the chassis to catch a look of the AMD Vega graphics card, but it appears to be well-shielded from our view. All we can say is that the card appears to be rather quiet… at least it was not audible in the hubbub of the room.

 

id Software On AMD Vega And Vulkan

Earlier that day, Billy Khan (Lead Project Programmer of id Tech 6 and DOOM) spoke about AMD Vega and Vulkan. Here are the key takeaway points :

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  • Vulkan brings “close to the metal” coding to the PC
  • This allows for closer development of console and PC games
  • Micro-optimisations are now very easy to port from consoles to PC
  • They have been running DOOM at 4K on super high quality at over 70 fps on an early (few weeks old) AMD Vega silicon

We came away with the feeling that Billy was very impressed with the performance and stability of the Vega GPU. Hopefully, this will assuage the frustrations of AMD fans who are eager to see the AMD Vega to take on the NVIDIA Pascal…

 

The AMD Vega Launch Date

Right now, AMD will not reveal how close they are to the final silicon. Only that they aim to launch Vega in the first half of 2017.

For more information on AMD Vega, take a look at our AMD Vega GPU Architecture Tech Report.

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Vulkan Support For DOOM Now Available

Today, id Software announced the availability for the Vulkan version of DOOM that relies on innovative features to deliver incredible performance.

As many of you already know, the Vulkan API is a descendant of AMD’s Mantle that supports close-to-metal control across Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, and Linux. Compared to OpenGL, Vulkan substantially reduces “API overhead” – the background work a CPU does to interpret what a game asks of the hardware – to deliver meaningful features, performance, and image quality and expose GPU hardware features that wouldn’t ordinarily be accessible through OpenGL

 

DOOM

DOOM benefits from Vulkan support by using several great features:

  • Asynchronous Shaders: Using multiple command processors — the Asynchronous Compute Engines in AMD’s Graphics Core Next and Polaris GPU architectures — each queue can submit commands without waiting for other tasks to complete.
  • Shader Intrinsics or Shader Intrinsic Functions, also called built-in functions, provide a way for game developers to directly access graphics hardware instructions in situations where those instructions would normally be abstracted by an API. This approach has been used successfully on gaming consoles to extract more performance from the GPU — and now AMD is enabling PCs with the same capability.
  • Frame Flip Optimizations which basically pass the frame directly to the display once it’s ready, i.e. skips the copy and save.

As Robert Duffy, Chief Technical Officer of id software pointed out at the AMD event at Computex 2016, “Vulkan is a modern API, with roots to AMD’s Mantle technology, and it provides real benefits to both us as developers and the large community of gamers using a wide range of hardware. When you factor in additional AMD features, like true Asynchronous Compute, custom intrinsic instructions, and combine those with a raw speed of idTech 6, we believe the experience on AMD will be hard to beat.”

 

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Faster Performance

Performance numbers produced by AMD internal testing show the performance benefits of Vulkan versus OpenGL implementation:

 

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