DOOM, OpenGL and Vulkan...

[Hulk'O'Saurus]

Just wanted to jam a bit in DOOM for fun...

 

Aah... GT 83VR 6RF Titan SLI GTX 1080 MSI.

 

Nvidia had another update on GeForce experience before I played and I remember very well that I never had to touch the OpenGL option in video settings. I play the game with vsync on and frames drop to like 20 when there are more than 3 enemies on screen. Smoke and such drop them, as well. I fiddle a bit around with no success and then I notice the OpenGL 4.5 and Vulkan options. Switch to Vulkan, vsync off and frames refuse to drop under 150 at the most hectic of times with 200 most of the time. I shrug and read why Vulkan is better, but I still don't think I fully understand.

 

Maybe somebody could shine a bit of light in plain English? Please?  

Edited February 26, 2018 by Hulk'O'Saurus

[injurai]

Games render with massive parallelism, and OpenGL is a GPU API graphics library o that allows programmers to write rendering code that target's GPU architecture. OpenCL can be used for example to write more generic non-graphics code that targets GPUs.

 

OpenGL's history is fascinating but to suffice to say. It's the produce of a budding and growing industry and the library is the result of trying to keep pace with rapidly evolving proprietary technology, and numerous other attempts to make improved standards. After many cluster****s and corporate nightmares, OpenGL was able to become something quite respectable, even if a somewhat fractured and warted standard. It's perfectly fine to write in, but going forward it's in less of a position to really take advantage of the newest architectures.

 

Vulkan is a fresh start that reevaluates how graphics libraries should be designed for modern GPU architecture. It forgoes a lot of backwards compatibility with cards that have no business seeing a flow of electrons. It has a huge advantage of hind-sight with respect to best practices. It's also lower-level to some extent, meaning it offers a more granular set of primitives that can be composed to fine tune rendering code to the implementors desire. Meaning it's a bit more laborious to work with, but the shader implementor will be able to better map rendering algorithms to the underlying hardware, and will be better able to make performance trade offs.

 

OpenGL is certainly less suited for the future of graphics code, but I also think part of the performance disparity has to due with Vulkan better targeting new hardware and simply being more worthy of the coders time when it comes to performance tuning.

[Hulk'O'Saurus]

So Vulkan is basically specifically designed to handle the graphical side of games? That's what I am gathering from everything I've read plus your post on top of it. Not that it doesn't help--it clarifies a few things quite succinctly. Cheers for that! There is also that bit about multiple processors being utilized more fully, and I did notice something like that when I was looking at the performance metrics. 

 

It's just that before I've never had to change the OpenGL setup, whereas suddenly my old DOOM configuration was unplayable after like a Nvidia update. 

 

Its good there is somebody who can explain, because otherwise people like me would be lost  . 

[Zoraptor]

OpenGL is pretty near defunct at this point, Vulkan is its direct replacement- they're both administered by the same people. There will only be more problems with OpenGL going forward especially on newer hardware. Somewhat ironically given your experience nVidia isn't that keen on Vulkan since its parallelism tends to favour AMD cards compared to DirectX.

[Hulk'O'Saurus]

OpenGL is pretty near defunct at this point, Vulkan is its direct replacement- they're both administered by the same people. There will only be more problems with OpenGL going forward especially on newer hardware. Somewhat ironically given your experience nVidia isn't that keen on Vulkan since its parallelism tends to favour AMD cards compared to DirectX.

 

Well...the way you put it, NVidia doesn't have a choice but to stick with Vulkan. I mean, what else can they do?

[Zoraptor]

Like OpenGL Vulkan isn't used in that many games. nVidia also has a successful partnership program which tends to be focused on things which nVidia cards do well, like tesselation.