Vulkan API

[Mindf!3ldzX]

I sit there to pretty much (Radeon HD 7640G)

Would that make me eligible for Vulkan? If so how do I install it!?

This link should set you right up ; AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.3 Release Notes

[Adam]

@Mindz
I didn't know they had already implemented it, I guess they would be on the ball about these things.

Doom is lovely, and sooo fast.
I find myself zipping around, shooting then ripping them apart in a shower of health pickups.
Followed by way more time backtracking, sightseeing and seeking out the little Doom guys.

[Gem]

ok Spock I trust your computer is kickass to play games on

I thought this was a graphic video card but its a software ok, so Im seeing some users here are happy with the fast performance of it? it sounds a bit like the nvidia physics thing (for games that support it)-software that you install

I got amd hardware, vid and cpu, so installing stuff from that link Minds would be ok i guess?

[Mindf!3ldzX]

ok Spock I trust your computer is kickass to play games on

I thought this was a graphic video card but its a software ok, so Im seeing some users here are happy with the fast performance of it? it sounds a bit like the nvidia physics thing (for games that support it)-software that you install

I got amd hardware, vid and cpu, so installing stuff from that link Minds would be ok i guess?

The biggest difference between the PhysX that Nvidia bought from Ageia is that Vulkan is 100% open source, a collaboration of all the big companies. PhysX is behind a walled garden that only Nvidia gpu's can utilize.... you CAN use PhysX on the CPU but it is so underperforming compared to the GPU.

Nvidia is imo fn evil when it comes to sharing, and AMD tends to support opensource.

ps: who's Spock lol.

Gem, you should be able to use it based on if you have a GCN based video card, which is HD7000 series. If you aren't sure what you have, you can download GPU-Z and that will tell you what you got.

[Izhido]

ps: who's Spock lol.

See that Star Trek booth, over there? Ask for more info there.

While you're at it, turn down your geek credentials like RIGHT NOW :/ .

[Spike]

I've written a vulkan renderer for fte.

benchmarks are all at 640*480, gtx 750 ti, i7 [email protected] (so an old cpu with a more recent but budget gpu).
All tests are with the same settings, just switching renderers with fte's setrenderer command.
I have fte's vk_submissionthread cvar set, which is equivelent to enabling nvidia's 'threaded optimisation' feature in nvidia's control panel thing.

just standing idle on the start map, with no lavaballs/rtlights visible.
gl: 1940fps (this is depressing, but from past experience opengl always got much more competitive framerates on linux (beating win7's d3d9) where there wasn't any microsoft code interfering in the software stack)
d3d9: 2500fps (to be fair, d3d9 has the least features of fte's renderers)
d3d11: 2180fps (release builds seem bugged somehow, but this is still consistent with the framerates from debug builds)
vulkan: 4500fps (second most features...)

timedemo fodmark.qwd (a 30-min 4on4 qw demo that bigfoot gave me a few years back)
gl: 1645.8 fps (gah! I left dynamic rtlights enabled)
d3d9: 2167.4 (oh hey, I never implemented rtlights properly here)
d3d11: 1583.8 fps (the world is still black, as are the rtlights)
d3d11 warp: 265.1 fps (pure cpu software d3d11 implementation, no gpu required!)
vulkan: 3011.0 fps (yeah, the rtlights are still on)
headless: 12665.4 fps (yeah, that isn't actually drawing ANYTHING at all, nor even loading any textures, this is more a measure of fte's non-rendering overheads. its not even drawing rtlights! *phew*. disabling audio would probably help quite a lot)

yeah, I suck at benchmarking, so make your own!
DISCLAIMER: the following build's vulkan renderer may still be broken on amd gpus, all I can really say is that it works on my computer.
http://triptohell.info/moodles/win64/fteqw64.exe <- revision 5005.
remember, set vk_submissionthread 1 before vid_restart for a nice speed boost with vulkan.

A Massive Pinch of salt:
if you run the game at 1920*1080 then you will see a significant dropoff in performance from vulkan.
for me, vulkan drops to about 1kfps at 1920*1080, while d3d9 is barely affected (and in fact actually benefits from running fullscreen, while vulkan is unable to disable windows' compositor and thus doesn't gain any fps simply by being fullscreen.
I've actually had the vulkan renderer working (for me) for quite some time now, but this particular issue has kinda prevented me from being in any way enthusiastic about it. It'd be great to know if amd has the same issue or not.

[Gem]

Well the joke is (my joke) that Spock made a supercomputer, a Vulcan supercomputer hehe and he says its plays games great

Anyway, yea I dont have a GCN card it seems as my card is below the 7000. The thing is that if you install Crimson it might over-ride your catalyst video driver, and when I uninstalled Crimson as I found out I got a non GCN card, then the installation somehow took out everything ati video card related software from my computer lol -so I had no video driver at this point and my windows screen was displayed at a small resolution. So, it was like almost 2 hours lost, trying to find the right version again of what I had and putting it back up. So everybody beware if you want to attempt this.

After installing Catalyst back up then I installed the correct non-GCN Crimson and that over-wrote the Catalyst and its not visible on my system at all lol - at least not in the system tray like before. So I think it over wrote it. Now a question still lingers in my mind if I had wasted all this time for nothing, maybe I couldve just left the GCN version installed as everything was still working fine at that point - but what difference would it have made if my card was GCN or not? (maybe some functions wouldn't work) but overall it did work at that time..lol Now also some portions of windows panels and in my browser appear pink lol

Yea so that was my story, for everyone that wants to install/ uninstall this.

I've owned an Nvida card before, before switching to the ATI video card... in my opinion the ati is better built, more solid construction, performs better and has better colors. Im not sure if the story is the same now but at the time I switched over, those were my observations.

[Mindf!3ldzX]

See that Star Trek booth, over there? Ask for more info there.

While you're at it, turn down your geek credentials like RIGHT NOW :/ .

lol. STAR TREK BOOTH? WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?

Also, I know who Spock is, but I didn't know as to who Spock was referring. I had a moment of epic fail, but turning in my geek credentials? NEVER! =O

[Mindf!3ldzX]

I've written a vulkan renderer for fte.

benchmarks are all at 640*480, gtx 750 ti, i7 [email protected] (so an old cpu with a more recent but budget gpu).
All tests are with the same settings, just switching renderers with fte's setrenderer command.
I have fte's vk_submissionthread cvar set, which is equivelent to enabling nvidia's 'threaded optimisation' feature in nvidia's control panel thing.

just standing idle on the start map, with no lavaballs/rtlights visible.
gl: 1940fps (this is depressing, but from past experience opengl always got much more competitive framerates on linux (beating win7's d3d9) where there wasn't any microsoft code interfering in the software stack)
d3d9: 2500fps (to be fair, d3d9 has the least features of fte's renderers)
d3d11: 2180fps (release builds seem bugged somehow, but this is still consistent with the framerates from debug builds)
vulkan: 4500fps (second most features...)

timedemo fodmark.qwd (a 30-min 4on4 qw demo that bigfoot gave me a few years back)
gl: 1645.8 fps (gah! I left dynamic rtlights enabled)
d3d9: 2167.4 (oh hey, I never implemented rtlights properly here)
d3d11: 1583.8 fps (the world is still black, as are the rtlights)
d3d11 warp: 265.1 fps (pure cpu software d3d11 implementation, no gpu required!)
vulkan: 3011.0 fps (yeah, the rtlights are still on)
headless: 12665.4 fps (yeah, that isn't actually drawing ANYTHING at all, nor even loading any textures, this is more a measure of fte's non-rendering overheads. its not even drawing rtlights! *phew*. disabling audio would probably help quite a lot)

yeah, I suck at benchmarking, so make your own!
DISCLAIMER: the following build's vulkan renderer may still be broken on amd gpus, all I can really say is that it works on my computer.
http://triptohell.info/moodles/win64/fteqw64.exe <- revision 5005.
remember, set vk_submissionthread 1 before vid_restart for a nice speed boost with vulkan.

A Massive Pinch of salt:
if you run the game at 1920*1080 then you will see a significant dropoff in performance from vulkan.
for me, vulkan drops to about 1kfps at 1920*1080, while d3d9 is barely affected (and in fact actually benefits from running fullscreen, while vulkan is unable to disable windows' compositor and thus doesn't gain any fps simply by being fullscreen.
I've actually had the vulkan renderer working (for me) for quite some time now, but this particular issue has kinda prevented me from being in any way enthusiastic about it. It'd be great to know if amd has the same issue or not.

did you use 64bit or 32bit executable can you hook up a link to that demo for comparison?

I'm about to benchmark startmap idle (1440x900x32 , woops forgot to add this)
No lavaballs visible / rt lights visible
gl : 1340 (impressed,screenshot worked appropriately F12)
d3d9:4024 (expected,screenshot broke it wouldn't write image)
d3d11:3693 (not expected,because I couldn't ss them all I didnt even try,this was lighting went wonky or something blackmap)
d3d11 warp:11fps (WOW this was a train wreck,same black map again)
vk:1634 (I think I tripped and fell into some pebkac I'll try this again)

vk_submissionthread 1 , vid_restart gave a speed boost up to 2400's

[Phenom]

Be jelly of my PC Specs and weep in your insecurities of how beautiful my Doom error console renders.

I started at the bottom(17FPS)... Now I'm at Vulkan(See image).



It's ok that u mirin.

[killingtime187]

Trying it out. Looks good so far. I tend to play with minimal settings, so tweaking to match my qrack setup. Aside the small color differences, the one thing I couldn't match is the LG beam type and alpha -- qrack has gl_lightning_type and gl_lightning_alpha. Is there anything in FTE like this ?

Qrack:



FTE:

[killingtime187]

Grrr. How do you embed images in this chat ? The links are:

Qrack -- https://goo.gl/photos/WJDaEfm3U42Rk61p9
FTE -- https://goo.gl/photos/anbmERPbyVPaovE18

[Mindf!3ldzX]

Grrr. How do you embed images in this chat ? The links are:

Qrack -- https://goo.gl/photos/WJDaEfm3U42Rk61p9
FTE -- https://goo.gl/photos/anbmERPbyVPaovE18

your url's don't end with an extension type is probably the problem, use imgur for ease of linking imo, there is a button you can press (share BBCODE) and it automatically sticks the [img] tag's in your clipboard, just paste

[killingtime187]

Thanks Mindz. Let me get that imgur account going now...

[enderandrew]

I've got a stupid question. How are you benchmarking FPS for each of these? Are you grabbing an average over time, or just initial idle FPS on the start map?

I'd love to test out Vulkan in particular, but I'm a little disheartened that it isn't performing well at 1920x1080, as that is my standard gaming resolution.