id Software loves pushing and embracing new technology, so it’s great to see it announce Doom support for Vulkan, a graphics and compute API technology from the Khronos Group.
Vulkan enables very low-level access to the hardware which puts the driver overhead back into the hands of the developers. In the case of Doom, Vulkan should provide improved performance on both low and high-end GPUs.
“When we were looking to adopt Vulkan for DOOM, the main question we asked ourselves was: ‘What’s the gamer benefit?’ Ultimately the biggest benefit will be high framerates,” explains Robert Duffy, CTO, id Software. “There are a number of game-focused reasons super-high framerates matter, but primarily it’s movement and player feel. The game just feels amazing running that fast, so we made it a priority to try to really exploit the available hardware on PC.
“We also anticipate some older GPUs will now be able to play the game at good framerates. We hope the range of GPU support widens with additional game and driver updates. That said, this is the first time a triple-A game is releasing on a brand-new API and brand-new drivers so there may be a few bumps, but our testing is showing really great performance and stability.”
To enable Vulkan you need to be running the latest graphics drivers. When launching DOOM from Steam you’ll be prompted with a new menu to choose either OpenGL or Vulkan. It is also possible to switch between OpenGL and Vulkan in game via the Settings > Advanced > Graphics API options menu.
Source: id Software
