Doom got a special low level API treatment earlier today. The latest game patch brings a lot of optimizations enabled by the use of the low-level API Vulkan. The patch was released in collaboration of AMD, unleashing the following features:
- Asynchronous Shaders: Using multiple command processors — the Asynchronous Compute Engines in AMD’s Graphics Core Next and Polaris GPU architectures — each queue can submit commands without waiting for other tasks to complete.
- Shader Intrinsics or Shader Intrinsic Functions, also called built-in functions, provide a way for game developers to directly access graphics hardware instructions in situations where those instructions would normally be abstracted by an API. This approach has been used successfully on gaming consoles to extract more performance from the GPU — and now AMD is enabling PCs with the same capability.
- Frame Flip Optimizations which basically pass the frame directly to the display once it’s ready, i.e. skips the copy and save
AMD itself promised up-to 27% higher performance with their latest Polaris GPUs:
Meanwhile, several sites have benched the game with the latest patch, and the performance uplift seems incredible so far (at least for AMD GPUs):
HWBench foot note: AMD GPUs seems to benefit a lot from async compute, however Nvidia drivers seems to extract all GPU performance without this feature. In OpenGL mode, this game showed a significant advantage with Nvidia products.