Doom's Vulkan patch is a PC performance game-changer

[Administrator]

The PC version of the Doom 2016 reboot finally has the Vulkan API update we've been waiting for. Everyone's a winner in terms of higher performance but for AMD owners in particular, there are some game-changing improvements. Our initial tests suggest anything from a 30 to 40 per cent increase in gaming performance for Radeon users but these are rough, initial numbers. It could actually be higher.
So what is Vulkan exactly? Well, think of it as the OpenGL equivalent to DirectX 12, with many of the same advantages - principally, far better utilisation of multi-core CPUs, along with the implementation of GPU asynchronous compute. The latter element in particular sees big improvements for Radeon hardware, and it's used extensively in Doom. id Software's lead rendering programmer Tiago Sousa recently revealed efficiency improvements of 3-5ms per frame on the console versions of the game - a seriously big deal when you have a 16ms per-frame render budget.
In a tech interview with Digital Foundry (due to be published in full this weekend), the id team talk about the advantages of Vulkan and the potential of async compute in particular.
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