Roman god to speed up your Doom

By Digital News Asia July 13, 2016

Doom game gets support for Vulkan API
Over 20 percent boost in performance

Videogame publisher, Bethesda Software has announced the arrival of its Vulkan API patch for the first person shooter, Doom. They predict a significant jump in performance due to the game's support for the API's new features including asynchronous shaders.

According to Robert Duffy, CTO of id Software, frame rates should improve so much that even some older GPUs will be able to run the game.

Vulkan was originally announced by the Khronos Group in March 2015, with a tentative launch date set for late 2015. In case you are not familiar with Khronos, it’s a non-profit industry consortium founded fifteen years ago by some of the biggest names in the graphics industry, including ATI (now a part of AMD), Nvidia, Intel, Silicon Graphics, Discrete, and Sun Microsystems.

Unlike its predecessor OpenGL, Vulkan is designed from the ground up to run on diverse platforms, ranging from mobiles and tablets, to gaming consoles and high-end desktops. The underlying design of the API is modular. So it enables the creation of a common, yet extensible architecture for code validation, debugging, and profiling, without impacting performance.

Sasa Marinkovic, Head of VR and Software Marketing at AMD, confirms that the new Vulkan API supports "close-to-metal" control and reduces API overhead. Doom benefits from several Vulkan API features including asynchronous shaders, shader Intrinsics as well as frame flip optimisations.

See this video if you wish to get an overview of the Vulkan API and how it impacts 3D graphics.