In this case, Valve says that the Nvidia Linux driver lacked multithreading support - and once they added it to a later version of the driver, performance increased.īut here’s the best bit: Using these new OpenGL optimizations, the OpenGL version of L4D2 on Windows is now faster than the DirectX version. Valve is carrying this relationship over to Linux, which is very important for the continued growth of Linux as a gaming platform. This last point is interesting: Valve has long-standing relationships with AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, where Valve reports driver bugs and the GPU maker fixes them in a timely fashion.
To realize such a huge performance gain, a three-pronged approach is taken: The game is tweaked to play nicely with the Linux kernel, the game is optimized to work with OpenGL (rather than DirectX), and bugs in the Linux graphics drivers are addressed. The Linux port of L4D2 didn’t start off at 315 fps, of course - the initial version actually maxed out at just 6 fps. Valve attributes the speed-up to the “underlying efficiency of the kernel and OpenGL.”
The Vulkan numbers put the RX 480 on the right sort of footing against GTX cards, going by comparative performance in other games.These figures are remarkable, considering Valve has been refining the Source engine’s performance under Windows for almost 10 years, while the Valve Linux team has only been working on the Linux port of Source for a few months. Nice gains, huh? Being fair to Nvidia, AMD's OpenGL performance was way below par in Doom. The results may not be absolutely identical to what we've shown before - available here - but they're consistent in themselves and actually very close to the OpenGL 4.3 you see on that page. FRAPS doesn't work in Vulkan so we've benchmarked by pulling up the 'show performance metrics' in the advanced section, running around our map, and dividing the number of elapsed frames by the time to give an average FPS.
Full release notes for the new AMD driver are here, as are download links. It has also made sure that if you restore factory defaults the toggle will be off. Building on the power draw features, AMD has now introduced a compatibility mode UI toggle which is 'off' at its default setting. AMD also took the time to tweak some other aspects of the driver. Now a new driver, 16.7.2, has arrived with support for DOOM (with the Vulkan API).
Only last week AMD released a new driver to address the PCI-e power draw issue that stirred up quite a bit of news coverage.
For AMD users there are some very new drivers, released just a few hours ago, the Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.7.2 driver. The recommended drivers for Nvidia users are the Game Ready v368.69 WHQL drivers released last week.
Exceptions to that rule include owners of the Nvidia GTX 690, and any Nvidia graphics card with 2GB of RAM on Windows 7 systems. At the current time only AMD GPUs with the new driver (see below) can run DOOM with asynchronous compute support.įor compatibility, if your graphics card meets the DOOM minimum requirements, it likely supports Vulkan. To uncap the framerate you must disable V-Sync in the in-game settings. However, please note that if you switch, the game will restart. Whatever you choose, it is possible to switch in game via the Settings > Advanced > Graphics API options menu. When launching DOOM from Steam you will get a prompt with a new menu to choose either OpenGL or Vulkan. Bethesda says that it has worked closely with both AMD and Nvidia daily since March 2016 in getting DOOM and Vulkan working the best they can on modern PCs. It allows low-level access to your PC's hardware resources and "moves most of the driver overhead into the developers’ hands". We are reminded that Vulkan is a cutting-edge next-generation graphics and compute API from the Khronos Group. It says that its "big technology push" will bring higher framerates and therefore improved player movement and feel, to provide an "amazing" experience, making the most of the hardware in your PC. Bethesda has implemented the Vulkan API in DOOM on the PC.