iD Software has finally put the finishing touches on the patch for DOOM that enables the Vulkan API. It’s been officially released and is available for download. This is now one of only a handful of games that makes use of the next generation API, including The Talos Principle.
Vulkan API just might be another gaming magic bullet
This patch is something that iD Software and Bethesda had been working on diligently since around March. It was then shown off during NVIDIA’s press conference at GDC when they revealed the GTX 1080 and 1070 GPUs. It was seen providing a decent boost in framerates for that, though without a reference at the time.
With Vulkan now fully working, they’ve enabled asynchronous compute and intrinsic shader functions. All of that combined should allow even older, 2GB equipped cards to perform much more adequately. Thus far in our testing we’re seeing a fair increase in performance for AMD cards and a slight improvement for NVIDIA. We’re not quite finished in our testing, but will be done shortly and will compare to the OpenGL version. Vulkan drivers are also much better with AMD, meaning the difference might be even more significant than previously thought.