Vulkan Benchmarking Plans, Last Day For Valentine Premium Special

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Vulkan Benchmarking Plans, Last Day For Valentine Premium Special

By now hopefully you've read our big launch day article with everything you need to know about Vulkan on Linux. In there I also said a few words about benchmarking...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Vulkan-Benchmarks-Valentine

[tuke81]

There's no vulkan drivers that supports Fermi generation graphics cards, nor not known will there ever be.

[Azpegath]

Of course it is highly interesting! Just to see the state of the drivers and the state of the support from the start! I expect no performance improvements, etc, probably the opposite right now, but boy am I excited! =)

[humbug]

I tried it out on Windows 10 with R9 290 by manually switching to the Talos Principle beta. When I switched to the Vulkan renderer it gave a pop-up warning saying that this is beta software and to expect rendering and performance issues. AMD website also said it's beta. And indeed performance was about 20% lower than directX 11 and CPU usage was a bit all over the place. No rendering issues though. Tried it at ultra settings 1080p. Meanwhile many Nvidia users are reporting crashes when trying to use Vulkan.

Then the dev made below post. It seems that they have just used a wrapper to achieve Vulkan API calls and get it out as early optional beta. Only step 1 of below is achieved so far. Step 2 to 3 to have their game engine properly utilizing Vulkan are not done yet and beta users will have to await more patches over a period of time.

engine design for Vulkan is basically consited of three major parts:\

1) Port. Make it work as fast as possible just by wrapping current engine design around Vulkan. Avoid all pitfalls and bottlenecks. This is what we did by now and released as patch for Talos.

2) Use Vulkan for multi-threaded rendering. Our engine is designed really well for multi-threaded rendering, but we have only our wrapper for it - calls to graphics API (like Vulkan) are not multi-threaded. Yet.
That being said, this is the next step what we'll do. And probably release that also as patch for Talos. I tried to do that with Direct3D 11 long time ago (support for its deffered contexts), but it was too much pain and too little or even no gain. [] That's just one of reasons why we decided to stick with our own approach for MT renderer for that long. [:/]

3) Redesign engine for Vulkan. This is the biggest step and can be split in two:

3a) Precache all rendering states (which mostly mean materials in game) up front. This will make rendering calls much simplier and faster. So, instead of deciding at rendering time what is needed for a material to be rendered via Vulkan, do this at loading time and then when material needs to be rendered just give it to Vulkan, via one or two simple function calls.

3b) Precache all geometry, material, textures, everything that is needed for rendering an object up front. This basically creates so called command buffer ready for Vulkan, and nothing extra needs to be set or created at render time.

3rd part of port is, obviously, the most complex one, and it'll take time to change engine design for it, step-by-step.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/25751...1651559970/#p2

This mirrors what Chris Robers said about how much time it takes to properly refactor your engine to get the best out of DX12. So all in all we are not going to get any useful vulkan benchmarks for now...

[SomeoneElse]

The German site ComputerBase did a shot test with Vulkan and DX11/Vulkan/OpenGL - Vulkan performance is not on pair with DX11 but much better than OpenGL: http://www.computerbase.de/2016-02/v...los-principle/ - so lets hope the best for linux gaming

[darkbasic]

Please benchmark Talos Principle even if Vulkan isn't still as good as the GL backend.

[smitty3268]

But are you interested in seeing benchmarks right now anyways of Talos with Vulkan? Talos Principle on Windows vs. Linux with Vulkan?

Was this meant to be a rhetorical question?

[eydee]

Considering the almost catastrophic difference between Talos windows and linux performance on AMD, once the vulkan driver comes out, it should be a lot better than running on opengl. Not because the rendering path is better, but because how crappy the old opengl linux driver is. So I think this should be top priority, as soon as possible. (It wouldn't be that much interesting on nvidia side though.)

[emblemparade]

OK already! I keep tipping you, but this time I "subscribed". Thank you, Phoronix, for being the only public voice keeping Linux and other FOSS on its toes. It's good to talk the talk, but you make sure these companies walk the walk. I'm extremely eager for your upcoming Vulkan benchmarks. Any chance you can get them running on Windows and compare?

[tomtomme]

Me toooooo. Want to have benchies!