VKNEO Will Be Released Soon: Doom 3 BFG Over Vulkan

An id Software programmer is expected to soon release his port of Doom 3 BFG to the Vulkan renderer rather than OpenGL.

Dustin Land of id Software has been working on "vkneo", his unofficial/personal project to port Doom 3 to using Vulkan rather than OpenGL. This isn't an official id Software project but is along similar lines to id's Axel Gneiting working on vkQuake, the port of Quake to Vulkan.

Land mentioned this morning via Twitter that he just has two issues to fix up before releasing VkNeo. He also commented of VkNeo's performance that it can run 500+ frames per second in simple areas while 150~300 frames per second in complex scenes. Doom 3 even with OpenGL on modern hardware really isn't demanding, but should be fun to see how well OpenGL vs. Vulkan perform for Doom 3.

Should be interesting to play with once the code drop happens. While Doom 3 BFG officially doesn't support Linux, Robert Beckebans plans to pull the VkNeo Vulkan support into his RBDOOM-3-BFG code-base -- one of the most interesting open-source Doom 3 projects to date -- and does have Linux support and other improvements. It will be interesting to see if this Vulkan renderer drives more open-source game developers into RBDOOM-3-BFG/ioDoom3 over ioquake3. Robert has also been working to ensure RBDOOM-3-BFG will work out fine for our benchmarking purposes.