A few months ago, IDSoftware and Nvidia showed off DOOM 2016 running off of the Vulkan API and it looked damn impressive. However when DOOM 2016 went gold and then eventually when it went live, Vulkan wasn’t ready to go public just yet. That changes as today, as DOOM 2016 now supports the Vulkan API and IDSoftware has pushed the update out. Looking at DOOM in my steam library, I can already see that an update is available, so I’ll be downloading that and checking it after work.
I’ll definitely try to get some metrics of DOOM, before and after the Vulkan update. Will post the video if I can get onto the game without having to update it.
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. There are a number of game-focused reasons super-high framerates matter, but primarily its 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.
If you’re not sure what Vulkan is or what this means for your DOOM experience, be sure to read up on the Bethesda Vulkan FAQ, here.
