Gadgetory

today we're looking at eed software's new doom iteration and this is running on the Vulcan api with a gtx 1080 so this is the sort of interesting part about the demo otherwise it's just gameplay of doom which is of course a good looking game but mostly interested in the API in the GPU so for a bit of backstory this demo was first given to us in Austin Texas during the GTX 1080 unveil in a closed doors press event and in that demonstration as we published on the website this particular demo that you're looking at right now was running at a range of 120 fps to 200 FPS maximum and then we were also told by developers in software that the FPS it's actually capable of going higher than 200 but to do to a game timing bug which will be resolved by launch they were capping the FPS to 200 so this has a range of 122 200 the video itself is rendered of course at 60fps and what you're looking at is 1080p ultra gaming with doom on the vulcan api to Vulcan is a new low-level API it's sort of similar in some ways to Direct X 12 and that it grants low-level access to the hardware and developers or game engine developers in most cases will be able to manually tap into things like memory and registers and make all those calls to better accelerate the graphics processing and that's what helps out here with reducing load on the cpu and things like that so this is on Vulcan the Vulcan patch won't be available on game launch you won't be able to play with Vulcan on day one but the proper Vulcan update will come within I think we were told a few weeks of launch if not sooner so you can expect it pretty immediately and we will be trying to benchmark that assuming computex doesn't interfere too much in terms of the graphics that you're looking at most of the things worth pointing out here are you can see some decals all these blood decals everywhere that's just normal sort of two-dimensional images arrays that are painted onto the surface as decals that will likely eventually disappear but the more interesting effects are all these particle effects and there's a lot of lighting and shading stuff going on some volumetric effects that you can in here that gun that was just being shot looks I can't really tell from this short clip but it looks like it's just almost shooting a sprite the explosives that are pretty damn cool and the gameplay looks quick I mean it reminds me of the old quake or UT games certainly old old doom games but I haven't played those in ages those look pretty interesting though graphically you're looking at some medium geometric complexity nothing too crazy going on low to medium geometric complexity with a lot of particle effects and shaders and lighting for the post-processing things like that to really drive the graphics to a different level other than this I think there is if i'm not mistaken physically based rendering within doom that's a pretty big thing now where you can actually watch our interview with Crytek about PBR physically based rendering and learn what that is and how it works interacts with the world interact with GPU on the GPU and cpu side of things vulcan does mean that a lot of the draw calls will be moved away from the cpu and on to the GPU and so a draw a call if you're not familiar with one is basically a term representing the process or the act of a cpu telling a GPU individually to draw a triangle and if you have complex geometry all these polygons and things we have complex geometry the CPU is going to making a lot of command issuing a ton of commands to the GPU to draw these triangles that's very inefficient and that's how it works with directx 11 there's really no way around it with a Vulcan and with DirectX 12 the API is able to bypass a lot of the overhead that's present in directx 11 and so these draw calls suddenly can just sort of be moved off of the CPU and handled entirely by the GPU that reduces a lot of the workload which means that in instances where CPU might start choking on the render thread or some other thread maybe the physics thread whatever where the CPU might start choking on one of these threads it is able to push that over to the GPU and you end up with these really high fidelity high frame rate graphics that we get now in the doom demonstration presented by its author and this is brand new gameplay footage by the way unedited by our team other than the voice-over so pretty interesting stuff draw calls have it's just one part of the advantage of DX 12 and Vulcan generally memory management's is another major item depending on how these Engine developers take advantage of the new API s and a lot of this is going to be on the end inside that's one of the more interesting things here is that from an industry standpoint it is it's really hard to properly build for Vulcan and dx12 it's not just like a free performance game that you get by sort of plugging in an API and this is why if you've seen some of the benchmarks with maybe rise of the Tomb Raider this is why you'll see Direct X 12 sometimes perform worse than directx 11 even though in theory it should perform better in almost every scenario and the reason is mostly because developers will either not build from the ground up for the new API which means it's not taking advantage of every aspect that does net these gains or they are wrapping the game so that it's just calling the x12 but it's not really instituting it at a low level and reaping those benefits and so when you wrap a game just like wrapping anything else and software all it's doing is actually creating an additional overhead and hence you'll see maybe a 1 or 2 FPS slow down with the X 12 / 11 so I believe that wraps up our doom at demo it's about six minutes here pretty good looking game I have not played it so I'm not going to comment on the gameplay but certainly looks good Vulcans a big deal but as always thank you for watching if you have questions about this stuff post them below maybe we'll address it in an ask GN otherwise or gt x 1080 review is coming up very shortly so do you subscribe for that patreon like the petrol video if you want help us out directly i'll see you all next time