Doom on PC now supports the Vulkan API, apparently upping the game’s silky smooth performance and delivering higher frame rates.
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Vulkan is a cutting-edge graphics and compute API technology developed by the Khronos Group that allows game developers to interact with graphics hardware at a lower level, allowing for more efficient use of hardware, improving game performance. With Doom, this should translate into a better gameplay “feel”. It’ll be smoother, faster and you’ll get more bang for your buck, basically.
So even with lower-end graphics cards, you should now see better performance at higher graphics settings, which is nice. Anyone who sits in the game’s recommended specs will have a lovely time with everything cranked right up.
“When we were looking to adopt Vulkan for DOOM, the main question we asked ourselves was: ‘What’s the gamer benefit?’,” writed Robert Duffy, CTO at id Software.
“Ultimately the biggest benefit will be high frame rates. There are a number of game-focused reasons super-high frame rates 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 frame rates. 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.”
Doom Vulkan support will be enabled via a patch that went live on Steam at 10am ET on Monday, July 11th, 2016. Vulkan will not run properly without updating to the latest unified drivers from AMD and NVIDIA for supported GPUs.