Vulkan Best Practices

[jleaveyBethesda]

Now that Vulkan support is live with DOOM on Steam, we wanted to provide some pro-tips for those who are either experiencing issues or are unsure about how to best optimize their experience using Vulkan. Here are some things you can try if you're experiencing any issues.

• After updating your drivers, be sure to restart your machine.
  
• Run the game at a resolution of 1920x1080
  
• Restart the game after any Advanced Settings changes.
  
• If you have a video card with 4GB or less VRAM, try adjusting the following features to increase performance:
  
• Resizing the Window Size
  
• Changing Resolution
  
• Changing Texture Quality Settings
  
• Changing Shadow Quality
  
• On AMD cards, select anti-aliasing modes TSAA or NO AA to make sure Asyncronous Compute is enabled
  
• Enable Performance Metrics from the Advanced Settings to see FPS counters rather than using external FPS counters, as external counters may have an impact on performance
  
• Disable the Steam Overlay

When can you expect most notable gains with Vulkan?

• Biggest expected gains are with AMD cards – not only due to Vulkan, but also due to AMD specific GPU low level optimization. This was achieved via extensions that AMD made specifically available for Vulkan, in particular AMD Intrinsics. Other thing is that Async Compute is immediately available for AMD cards
  
• Users in general should expect most gains, when game is CPU limited. E.g. if game is GPU limited and not an AMD card, will likely run similar. Users could verify such, if they run the game in low resolutions, such as e.g. 720p where being GPU bound is highly unlikely.
  
• The higher the resolution, the lower the gains, since the game will become more and more GPU limited.

[EASY PETE]

When i switched to vulkan i felt like my FPS went slightly lower which was bizarre and i had a few FPS dips but when i switched back to openGL 4.5 it was fine.

[Mr. Vulcanator]

Originally posted by SnarlyTrain:

When i switched to vulkan i felt like my FPS went slightly lower which was bizarre and i had a few FPS dips but when i switched back to openGL 4.5 it was fine.

Vulkan is not currently supported on NVIDIA GPUs with 2 GB of RAM on Windows 7 or on the GTX 690. Users with these GPUs need to run DOOM on the OpenGL graphics API.

[Genocide]

While I currently can't use vulkan, I do still have high hopes for it. It would be nice to take some strain off my FX-4100.

[Limygeorge]

It's time Nvdia implemented Vulkan friendly optimizations. I guess most of it could be improved via drivers, but not sure?
It's strange to me, I mean NV will do anything to beat AMD - except this.

Future NV Vulkan optimizations: any time soon??

[moody31415]

Vulkan seems to work OK on my GTX 980Ti, but it dramatically increases the load times, even on checkpoint loads. My Nvidia drivers are 368.81. It was even worse on .69

[Limygeorge]

Originally posted by moody31415:

Vulkan seems to work OK on my GTX 980Ti, but it dramatically increases the load times, even on checkpoint loads. My Nvidia drivers are 368.81. It was even worse on .69

Similar to me GTX 980 Driver 368.81. It works OK, and gives me a just a few fps more. Hasn't changed the load times at all though. So, yeah, it works with most NV cards, it's just that a lot of people using NV don't get much benefit. To be honest I cant tell the difference unless I look for it. Crisper picture, but could be my imagination, or placebo effect!?!

But I always have HW monitor running (70 hours total) and the VRAM usage is significantly less so there are efficiencies, just not noticable on high end cards. Also my monitor is G-Sync 144Hz. 2560 x1440p. It matches pretty much what the OP said.

But if/when NV include the optimizations (that AMD cards already have) hopefully NV card owners will see the benefits that AMD owners are very pleased about. Major performance boost mentioned in some threads here and other sites. But, to reiterate currently the benefits seem to be almost entirely on AMD. Lucky them.

[ExaKel]

you still need to fix vulkan looking like a stuttering mess when the fps is capped / vsync is on. with it off it runs smooth but with vsync on it stutters when panning the camera around.

[typemakeR]

Also while it does seem to run good, it doesn't seem to support SLI currently. So those of you using SLI should stick to OpenGL 4.5. (I tried and my fps dropped to single card performance figures.)

[EASY PETE]

Originally posted by Mr. Vulcanator:

Originally posted by SnarlyTrain:

When i switched to vulkan i felt like my FPS went slightly lower which was bizarre and i had a few FPS dips but when i switched back to openGL 4.5 it was fine.

Vulkan is not currently supported on NVIDIA GPUs with 2 GB of RAM on Windows 7 or on the GTX 690. Users with these GPUs need to run DOOM on the OpenGL graphics API.

I have a 980 ti though, which was very very odd. That shoulden't happen, and i'm on windows 10

[ko]

Why is your garbage engine still crashing randomly? Are you ever going to fix that "little" problem? How many people have you employed to sweeping this issue under the rug?

[Salamand3r-]

Originally posted by Limygeorge:

But I always have HW monitor running (70 hours total) and the VRAM usage is significantly less so there are efficiencies

Not only VRAM, system RAM usage is way down (on AMD GPUs, it might just be stupid-high driver overhead under AMD) from just over 8gb to just under 3gb when switching to Vulkan.

It doesn't matter to me really, but it should help some lower spec systems (at least, with AMD cards - I didn't notice it while testing my NV cards, but they have less VRAM anyway and that could have something to do with it as well).

[Chris]

Originally posted by The GRE womans wrinkly tits:

When i switched to vulkan i felt like my FPS went slightly lower which was bizarre and i had a few FPS dips but when i switched back to openGL 4.5 it was fine.

Ugh. The latest nvida driver (.81) update is making everything seem laggy/slower with no other changes to graphics settings. It was instantly noticeable. I turned vsync 'off' in the game, and enabled v-sync+ triple buffering in the Nvida control panel to get back to the smoothness of the previous driver. If it ain't broken, don't fix it Nvidia. What the heck guys? Latest video drivers are supposed to improve performance, not lower it.

[Dr.Love]

Just got to say: Vulkan made a significanty difference for me in this game. This technology (and DX12) will be a reall boon for the PC gaming industry as a whole. A real shame certain games will more than likely not retroactively see this enhancement implemented (i.e., Fallout 4).

[Mr. Vulcanator]

Originally posted by Dr.Love:

Just got to say: significanty

[Limygeorge]

Originally posted by Salamand3r:

Originally posted by Limygeorge:

But I always have HW monitor running (70 hours total) and the VRAM usage is significantly less so there are efficiencies

Not only VRAM, system RAM usage is way down (on AMD GPUs, it might just be stupid-high driver overhead under AMD) from just over 8gb to just under 3gb when switching to Vulkan.

It doesn't matter to me really, but it should help some lower spec systems (at least, with AMD cards - I didn't notice it while testing my NV cards, but they have less VRAM anyway and that could have something to do with it as well).

Yeah, that makes sense. However on NVDIA cards there is too little difference in system RAM to say it uses less. Makes sense for AMD cards though, as you said.

8GB to 3GB that is dam inpressive. My NV based system still uses between 7GB to over 8GB RAM though, with vulkan. Personally it's irrelevant as I have 16GB sys RAM. But this is good news for AMD card users with below 8GB sys memory. (To be honest, on my system, 8GB would be cutting it very fine - I'd say 12GB sys RAM for smooth running.) Game requirments are often higher than what was stated at release. Man, this game loves all types of memory!!

I am glad you posted about what most AMD card users can expect. Very good indeed.