Gadgetory

the doom reboot was released two months ago now and in that time a lot has happened in the world of graphics cards namely we've seen the release of invidious high-end Pascal GPUs and more recently the arrival of the mainstream radian rxt 480 from AMD upon release doom supported OpenGL making it a rare title indeed today nearly all games use some form of DirectX however it was doomed claimed support for Vulkan API that generated the most buzz we were told volcán would be patched in at a later date though it was demonstrated running on NVIDIA GTX 1080 at their press day in Texas on May the 6th since then I've been waiting eagerly for the day when I open up steam and finally see doing being patched up to support Vulcan well yesterday was that day Monday morning a fired up steam to find a dim patch that enabled support for Vulcan hell yet many of you are probably aware the doom isn't the first game to support Vulcan rather the Talos principle was the first game to support it followed by dota 2 in May that said dooms the first triple a title to use Vulcan and as a fast-paced first-person shooter it's an interesting pairing so we can assume it's software has been working with NVIDIA on dooms Vulcan support but what about little old AMD well the developer says it's worked with both Nvidia and AMD on a daily basis since late March to bring full doom and Vulcan driver support to the community like DirectX 12 volt is a low-level application programming interface however while DirectX 12 is the successor of DirectX 11 Vulcan is the successor of OpenGL a dated API are created by Silicon Graphics way back in 1992 the Cranitch group obtained the standard in 2006 and has been working on successor ever since as a low-level API Vulcan gives developers direct access to the GPU and offers more efficient multi-threading capabilities for the end user this translates to better overall performance and in the case of doom it will allow those with older video cards to run the game and much more acceptable frame rates that being the case I'll be comparing all the current generation and most of the previous generation AMD and NVIDIA GPUs in Doom using OpenGL and Vulcan also be running a few old GPUs as well to see what the benefits are for those using legacy hardware to enable Vulcan doom simply navigate to the advanced settings menu and switch the graphics API from OpenGL to Vulcan the game then resets exiting and then reloading as the changes are being made before I jump through the benchmarks here are a few quick notes all tests were conducted using my GPU test rig which is built inside the corsair carbide 600c with an Intel Core i7 6700 K clocked and locked at 4.5 gigahertz for a full list of the system specs please check the video description you'll also find a detailed video index there as well as always I'm using reference AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards unless otherwise specified ok so first let's take a quick look at how all these current and previous generation GPUs compare using OpenGL at 1080p using the Knightmare quality settings along with tssaa a we see that the nano and Furious struggle against the likes of the GTX 970 not something you'd expect to see likewise the gtx 960 our piece is the r9 380 comfortably now with Vulcan enabled ivory sorted the graph from fastest to slowest and we see quite a different lineup the GTX 980 for example went from the 4th fastest graphics card when using OpenGL to the 4th slowest with Vulcan this is down to the fact that the 90s performance is boosted by just three and a half percent well the I know 390 for example found an extra 51 percent which is actually incredible even the new affordable our X 480 is able to outpace the GTX 980 when using Vulcan rendering an impressive 128 FPS on average another big shock is the r9 380 which went from 53 fps to 85 fps a massive 60% jump in performance at the top of the AMD food chain we find the fury acts enjoying what's also a massive 52 percent increase in performance this is an incredible result for AMD as it means the fury X is actually 8 percent faster than gtx 1070 and just 14% slower than the gtx 1080 moving up to 1440p let's first take a quick look at the opengl results again we see the nanos strugglers against the GTX 970 while the fury X is only able to match the GTX 980 the GTX 960 easily beats the r9 380 as well while the three 9390 X and our X 480 are all slower than the GTX 970 resawing the graph according to the performance found when testing with Vulcan we again find a very different picture a picture that looks mighty encouraging for the red team although the fury acts wasn't able to beat the 10:17 this time was just a single frame slower whereas it was 18 FPS slower using OpenGL meanwhile the GTX 980 is beaten by the RX 4 ad albeit by a single frame although you'll also find the 390 and 390x delivering even greater performance towards the bottom of the graph the r9 380 can be found enjoying another 60 percent performance boost courtesy of Vulcan finally at 4k here are the results arranged by the OpenGL performance the GTX 980 is again able to match and even beat the fury acts by single frame here the gtx 960 is 2 FPS faster than the r9 380 while the GTX 970 was 1 to 2 FPS faster than the Ono 390 and RX 480 at 4k we find virtually no difference between using OpenGL and Vulcan with the Maxwell and Pascal GPUs the gtx 1070 for example averaged 53 FPS using both api's the fury acts however was 40% faster at 4k when using Vulcan allowing for a huge jump from 37 fps to a very playable 52 FPS this jump also placed the fury acts on par with in videos 980ti and 1017 noteworthy gains can be seen when looking at the recently released our X 480 where we went from a dicey 31 FPS using OpenGL to a much smoother 42 FPS with Vulcan diono 390 and nano also saw similar gains incredibly if the unknow 390x was just 2 FPS slower than the gtx 1070 using Vulcan I believe the 390 X and 390 you're doing so well here in relation to the fury X and nano due to the limited 4 gigabyte memory buffer of the HBM cards The Fury axon nano is certainly powerful enough to utilize more memory so this could be an issue at 4k using the TSSAA a setting before wrapping up the benchmarks I wanted to take a look at how some of the older AMD Radeon graphics cards benefited from dooms Vulcan support what I found was graphics cards such as the Radeon HD 7970 in r9 280 didn't receive much of a performance boost at all in fact the gains were similar to what was seen with the Nvidia Maxwell and Pascal GPUs initially I put this down to them being GCN first gen paths but the r7 370 debunked that with a massive 110% gain using Vulcan the gcn ii j9 290 enjoyed a 46% performance boost and the r7 260x became 116 percent faster I'm not willing to say there aren't gains for the 7970 and 280 I've seen some on forums claim big gains for these cards sadly though I wasn't able to replicate those gains using my test system alright guys fasten your socks because they're about to be blown clean off previously we've seen the rx4 ad generally consumes more power than in videos previous generation Maxwell Bay's GTX 970 and this is true for doom using OpenGL here the our X 480 consumed almost 4 watts per frame while the GTX 970 consumed just 3.2 watts per frame however and this is the soft blowing part with Vulcan the story changes dramatically the RX 480 now consumed just under three watts per frame while the GTX 970 consumes roughly the same amount of power that it did using OpenGL for 3.2 watts per frame this makes the rx 40 considerably more efficient when using the Vulcan API and that's big news for AMD we've seen how well AMD's GCN architecture holds up in games such as ashes the singularity and hitman these are my opinion the most impressive results yet Doom is a title that predominantly favoured in video hardware and this can still be seen when testing with OpenGL however with Vulcan the story changes completely and we're now able to see the true potential of AMD's GCN architecture seeing the fear X able to match the gtx 1070 or 1440p and 4k was inspiring and will no doubt have the Radian 300 series owners very excited not only to the high-end AMD GPUs farewell but more importantly strong gains can be seen on the lower end cards with GPUs such as the r9 380 it was also great seeing strong gains on truly low-end discrete GPU such as the r7 370 and 970 260x oddly we didn't see any real gains from the 7970 and 280 but this could have just been an early teething issue I expect there'll be another update made to the game soon as we did encounter a few issues when testing often resolution changes would result in strange and inconsistent results forcing the game to be closed after each setting change and then reloaded there was also the occasional crash and is mostly impacted the green team in fact I was unable to load the game using a g4 6-years GPU so there could be an Nvidia driver update in the works as well thankfully we didn't see the NVIDIA GPUs performance going backwards like they're doing ashes of the singularity using DirectX 12 at times the word gains to be had although they only appear under CPU limited scenarios such as the 1070 and 1080 or 1080p that said some GeForce owners reporting a decline in performance when using Vulcan so I'll continue to do some investigating with different hardware configurations on that no performance gains received when using the Vulkan API will vary depending on the CPU used for example a weak CPU with the strong GPU will see much larger gains than pairing a strong CPU such as the 6700 K of 4.5 gigahertz like we did with a strong GPU by working closer to the metal Vulcan is able to bypass the CPU and feed the workload directly to the GPU so where the CPUs performance was once really important it's much less so now dooms implementation of Vulcan is really exciting and if this is a sign of things to come then the future looks very bright for AMD it seems like we've been waiting forever for the GC and architecture to pay off so could dooms Vulcan support mark the turn of the tide let me know what you think in the comments I'm your host Matt as always and I'll see you guys next time youtubers like me depend on your support to continue improving the quality and content of our videos to support the channel directly consider becoming a patron to also get access to a heap of cool rewards and exclusive giveaways also don't forget you can check prices and buy the products I looked at in this video through the Amazon links in the video description below thank you kindly for supporting me and the hardware unbox channel it means a lot to me and I really do appreciate it and in return I'll continue to work as hard as I can to keep producing the content you enjoy