And Vulkan is now here :)

Pieter3dnow

Pieter3dnow

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Vulkan - Industry Forged

Vulkan is Here!
Khronos launched the Vulkan 1.0 specification on February 16th, 2016 and Khronos members released Vulkan drivers and SDKs on the same day. Below you will find everything you need to come up to speed on Vulkan and to forge ahead and explore whether Vulkan is right for your engine or application.
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Some links to drivers and samples on the mentioned page.

Article by SA about AMD Vulkan

First look at DOOM running Vulkan.
 
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Awesome, I wasn't expecting Vulkan till late this year at the earliest. I thought it was delayed.
 
The queues there are interesting. 3 for the Fury and 1 for 980. Nvidia even has the transfer in with everything else. I thought they still had async transfers, but maybe not. Nobody appears to have ASTC working or the texture compression parts working. AMD doesn't appear to have sparse binding implemented. Although they should be able able to run bindless. I kind of want to see how many memory heaps enumerate on a 970. lol
 
Oh, I so hope Vulkan succeeds and becomes the standard, if only just to spite Microsoft. That's reason enough for me. :)
 
Interesting! I'm wondering of I should try those betas on my 390 and see if I notice any difference.
 
I was shocked to hear that even Nvidia is backing Vulkan. Now that all 3, Nvidia, AMD and Intel are all pushing Vulkan ahead the days of DirectX12 might be numbered.
 
Highly unlikely, they will have to get similar or at least close to Dx12 performance numbers for developer to do the extra work for Vulkan,
 
Compared to the OpenGL results the Vulkan numbers look really good. Considering we're talking about an API on par with DX12 using beta drivers at a beta release in a game that likely hasn't been optimized the numbers don't seem horrible. We already knew DX12/Vulkan was something that largely needed designed around to show an advantage and Talos only had DX11 and OpenGL.
 
So when a game has both opengl and dx modes to play...Is it pretty typical for dx11 to perform better?
 
Is this gonna have any benefit or say run properly on a 980ti? I heard Nvidia doesnt have much compute/async support on current gens, in fact i was under the impression this was all AMD stuff to contend with GWs, only that its open source to get more business (well it should be that way anyway), and that it end up being the birth of DX12 instead.

Guess i best sus this out, thx for links.
 
Anarchist4000 said:
Compared to the OpenGL results the Vulkan numbers look really good. Considering we're talking about an API on par with DX12 using beta drivers at a beta release in a game that likely hasn't been optimized the numbers don't seem horrible. We already knew DX12/Vulkan was something that largely needed designed around to show an advantage and Talos only had DX11 and OpenGL.
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20% is a big difference and we are looking at Dx11 and not 12, that would probably even be a bigger gap. But yeah its possible, that it is due to early drivers and a not optimized app. But in any case I was expecting a better showing than this.... I wonder if it was too soon to even show these number, waiting 2 months more probably would be better.

primetime said:
So when a game has both opengl and dx modes to play...Is it pretty typical for dx11 to perform better?
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Dx has been typically better than OGL, only because the mess OGL has been in as an API, so developers don't pay as much attention to that path since it will take longer to get equal performance. But if time was taken to get more performance out of OGL it should match Dx.
 
razor1 said:
20% is a big difference and we are looking at Dx11 and not 12, that would probably even be a bigger gap. But yeah its possible, that it is due to early drivers and a not optimized app. But in any case I was expecting a better showing than this.... I wonder if it was too soon to even show these number, waiting 2 months more probably would be better.
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Keep in mind the game released at the end of 2014 and the Vulkan renderer is in beta. So that DX11 path has probably been well optimized by now. DX12 vs Vulkan would be interesting to see, but my guess is results would be roughly comparable. Might be worth nothing that DX12 isn't there. I wouldn't necessarily put the blame on drivers either. It could very well be refactoring the game to work with the DX12/Vulkan resource model. Still, those seem like solid initial numbers.
 
hehe, no wonder Microsoft want to cozy up to Valve with Steam :D. Maybe persuade Valve to go with Window Steam Machines and DX12 before Vulcan really takes off and starts to compete fiercely.
 
Nebulous said:
Interesting! I'm wondering of I should try those betas on my 390 and see if I notice any difference.
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Tried it on my R9 290 and it ran about 20% worse than DX11. The developer's goal was to make it run for now, and then ask the community to look for broken textures / crashes. Then they will try optimizing the game after making ensuring that the base game runs properly. Right now the frame times are really bad under Vulkan which is 1000x much more of a problem than how many frames per second someone is getting.

Also the game is really demanding in DX11 if you go into the options and try setting up a doomsday scenario for your video card. You can make your system crawl which is fun to do. ;)
 
Vulkan has some support from Qualcomm now:

Since Vulkan is supported on the Adreno 530 GPU which only comes in the Snapdragon 820, we can’t say the support is far and wide. Today. That said Qualcomm promised to support the API in all upcoming Adreno 5xx GPUs, none of which have been announced yet, so those will probably be compatible at launch. Better yet the SoC giant is going to be backporting Vulkan to existing Adreno 4xx GPUs in the near-ish future. Stay tuned for more on that one, but you can assume it will trickle down in short order.
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Qualcomm shows up at the Vulkan party with the 820 - SemiAccurate
 
orbitalwalsh said:
looking forward to seeing AMDs new APUs working with low end GPUs on this for small budget builds
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So am I. There's a good potential market for them with Steam Machines and Vulkan is a game changer.
 
noko said:
hehe, no wonder Microsoft want to cozy up to Valve with Steam :D. Maybe persuade Valve to go with Window Steam Machines and DX12 before Vulcan really takes off and starts to compete fiercely.
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Eh not gonna happen. Valve will never touch Direct3D again. Source 2 titles will all be Vulkan.
 
so how does this actually work?...I would need to install a separate Nvidia driver for Vulkan?...both my current 361.91 consumer driver and Vulkan can be installed at the same time with no issues?
 
polonyc2 said:
so how does this actually work?...I would need to install a separate Nvidia driver for Vulkan?...both my current 361.91 consumer driver and Vulkan can be installed at the same time with no issues?
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Windows driver version 356.39 and Linux driver version 355.00.26 provide beta support for Vulkan.
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If you clicked the link in the 1st post (the one above everything else) you could end up here Vulkan Driver Support
 
noko said:
hehe, no wonder Microsoft want to cozy up to Valve with Steam :D. Maybe persuade Valve to go with Window Steam Machines and DX12 before Vulcan really takes off and starts to compete fiercely.
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Some cozy-up job; Quantum Break won't be available on Steam.
 
Ok so here are a few reviews with Vulkan and Talos Principle:

Quick Look: Vulkan Performance on The Talos Principle

Not bad but seems lacking in good comparisons. But you get a feel for Vulkan very early on.

Vulkan: Erste Benchmarks der neuen API in Talos Principle

Ok its german but the graphs seem a bit better to compare with. In every case Vulkan is behind DX11. Don't worry it is to be expected for now. But looking at their graphs the interesting part is that Vulkan seems capped at 122fps as both FuryX and 980Ti both have that for their FPS in Vulkan but with 980Ti having the lead with DX11. But the most interesting part is that the OpenGL path is definitely slower than both.
 
polonyc2 said:
so how does this actually work?...I would need to install a separate Nvidia driver for Vulkan?...both my current 361.91 consumer driver and Vulkan can be installed at the same time with no issues?
Click to expand...

Eventually it'll just be one driver. But for now, yeah, if you want to test Vulkan you have to use the beta driver, which is from an older branch.

DPI said:
...Source 2 titles...
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ohh you sweet, sweet innocent child
 
JustReason said:
Ok so here are a few reviews with Vulkan and Talos Principle:

Quick Look: Vulkan Performance on The Talos Principle

Not bad but seems lacking in good comparisons. But you get a feel for Vulkan very early on.

Vulkan: Erste Benchmarks der neuen API in Talos Principle

Ok its german but the graphs seem a bit better to compare with. In every case Vulkan is behind DX11. Don't worry it is to be expected for now. But looking at their graphs the interesting part is that Vulkan seems capped at 122fps as both FuryX and 980Ti both have that for their FPS in Vulkan but with 980Ti having the lead with DX11. But the most interesting part is that the OpenGL path is definitely slower than both.
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Its probably not capped its probably a CPU bottleneck.
 
Looks like Valve is stepping their game up with the latest Steam Beta client.

Steam Client Beta - Feb 18th
FEBRUARY 18 - PIERRE-LOUP
The Beta has just been updated with the following changes:

Steam Overlay
  • Added preliminary support for Vulkan games
Linux
  • Added libvulkan, the Vulkan ICD loader, to the Steam Runtime
  • Fixed an issue where toggling the overlay in fullscreen games could sometimes result in a loss of keyboard and mouse input
Steam Controller
  • On-screen keyboard is now available from standard desktop mode without running Big Picture as minimized
  • Improved stability and window placement of desktop on-screen keyboard
  • Reduced size of desktop on-screen keyboard.
  • Added the ability to use other controllers alongside Steam Controllers. Games with XInput support will use whichever controller is active, other games will prefer alternate controllers when present.
General
  • Deleting a non-Steam app will now remove the app from the game list immediately instead of on the next restart
  • A non-Steam app marked as hidden will now stay hidden after the client restarts
Big Picture
  • Increased friction when using drag scrolling
  • Restyled mouse scroll thumbs to indicate whether content is available in the given direction
SteamVR
  • When viewing the library page in VR for the currently running application, the Play Game button will now be an Exit Game button, which will instruct the running app to close.
  • When starting SteamVR, any non-Steam OpenVR applications registered with the OpenVR system will be created as shortcuts inside of Steam, and will be removed when SteamVR closes.
  • Increased friction and decreased sensitivity when using drag scrolling in VR.
  • When starting SteamVR, don't play the Big Picture startup sound.
 
Using vulkan doesn't magically make for better performance, the performance improvements come from application code being rewritten to take advantage of the lower level access. This basically means in the future much of the performance and optimization will be entirely on the developers themselves and will no longer come from drivers hacks and fixes from nvidia/amd that we see right now. The same goes for dx12, except you also get to be microsoft's b*tch and are restricted to what platforms you can release it on without switching api again.

For talos right now it is essentially the original opengl code being ran through the Vulcan api with no optimization and more of a proof of concept. We are not likely to see any improvements for a while until developers find out how to obtain the optimizations through vulkan as it literally just launched 2 days ago.

There is more info on the state of development for vulkan in this video if you have a hour to kill.

 
jwcalla said:
Eventually it'll just be one driver. But for now, yeah, if you want to test Vulkan you have to use the beta driver, which is from an older branch
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thanks...that's what confused me...don't know why they couldn't put Vulkan support into the latest 361.91 WHQL drivers...or maybe they did that on purpose because Vulkan is still not ready in the eyes of Nvidia for a full release
 
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