DOOM Gets Vulkan Implementation – Radeon RX 480 Gets Huge Performance Boost

By Nathan Kirsch

Today id Software announced the availability for the Vulkan version of DOOM! id Software has been very vocal for their support of the Vulkan API in recent months after noting that the DirectX 12 API isn’t the end-all API for PC Gaming. This is due to DirectX 12 on Windows and on Xbox is very different and that many gamers are still running Windows 7 and DirectX 12 is incompatible with Windows 7. The Vulkan API is a low-overhead API developed by the Khronos Group that is a descendant of AMD’s Mantle API. Vulkan gives developers better close-to-metal control over GPU resources while reducing driver overhead and it works with Windows 7, 8.1, 10, and Linux! Both AMD and NVIDIA have adopted Vulkan support and since it is an open source API many game developers are jumping on the Vulkan support train as well.

DOOM system requirements | Can I Run DOOM 2016

id Software and Bethesda saw that DOOM would benefit from Vulkan support by using several great features that wouldn’t be accessible through OpenGL.

Asynchronous Shaders: Using multiple command processors the Asynchronous Compute Engines 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.

Frame Flip Optimizations which basically pass the frame directly to the display once its ready, i.e. skips the copy and save.

DOOM Vulkan versus OpenGL Performance

The performance boosts by running Vulkan instead of OpenGL is pretty astounding. AMD internal testing says up to 27% performance gains were to be had when running Vulkan versus OpenGL on an AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB reference graphics card with the Ultra image quality preset. We charted the results for you above and you can see that that at 2560 x 1440 the benchmark score went from 68.5 FPS up to 84.3 FPS!

Up to 27% faster performance at 19201080 using Radeon Software 16.7.1 and DOOM Vulkan on Radeon RX480 than with Radeon Software 16.7.1 and DOOM OpenGL.
Up to 23% faster performance at 25601440 using Radeon Software 16.7.1 and DOOM Vulkan on Radeon RX480 than with Radeon Software 16.7.1 and DOOM OpenGL.

You will need to download AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.7.2 drivers to get the performance enhancements through support for Async Compute and Shader Intrinsics. NVIDIA GeForce owners will need to be using GeForce 368-69 WHQL drivers that came out last week. Vulkan is not currently supported on NVIDIA GPUs with 2 GB of RAM on Windows 7 or on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690. Those users will need to run DOOM on the OpenGL graphics API. You can read more Vulkan support for Doom ’16 PC in this Bethesda FAQ.