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What's up with Vulkan support in non idTech games?

Grimminski

Grimminski

Member
Oct 27, 2017
10,136
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Anything that isn't built on idTech that has Vulkan support has been a complete and total shit show.

World War Z
The Surge 2
Serious Sam (all of them, especially 4)
Zombie Army 4: Dead War

Those are the ones that I've played, and none of them are better in Vulkan. They run worse, stutter constantly and crash all the time compared to DX11, whereas the idTech stuff is basically flawless. So what's going on?

I just don't get it.
 
ILikeFeet

ILikeFeet

DF Deet Master
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
61,987
making engines is hard

Red Dead 3 runs pretty good compared to DirectX at least
 

Atom

Member
Jul 25, 2021
11,479
No idea but I've had iffy experience with some vulkan titles. Framepacing and whatever limiters are being used maybe are not the best. That said, some vulkan games I've found quite decent -- having been using the vulkan renderer for RDR2 and it seems fine, and most recently I had to use DXVK with wonderful 101 because no matter what else I tried the game was giving extremely inconsistent timings under dx9 after 30 seconds of playing.

Bit of an aside rant, but I honest to god don't get how frame limiters are all over the fucking place with PC ports. It's like only a minor visual inconvenience usually but there was stuff released this year like the Nier Replicant port:

Screenshot_20211211-004255_Chrome.jpg


Forced vsync and a frame limit of 58 fps is a match made in heaven. Thank god for Special K and kaldaien's crusade against latency and bad JRPG frame limiters. Almost single handedly carrying the JRPG market on PC lol.

Big pet peeves:

Games that call a mode fullscreen but it's not fullscreen.
Games that force vsync.
Games that override your monitor's default refresh rate.

I adore PC gaming (hardware of all time -- can't wait for PC2), but there is always one or two games like this in my library, sometimes not consistent across configs either. 98% works fine out of the box but yes I'm salty from troubleshooting for the last few hours lol.
 
KhadD

KhadD

Member
Oct 29, 2017
104
The transition to Vulkan ist easier from Opengl (id) than from Direktx (almost evebody else).
 
Edward850

Edward850

Software & Netcode Engineer at Nightdive Studios
Verified
Apr 5, 2019
992
New Zealand
Pottuvoi said:
It's almost like using low level API needs careful planning and a lot of work to get amazing results.
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Pretty much this. Vulkan and DirectX 12 work rather differently from your typical graphics APIs from before. Instead of passing render commands as they happen, you construct command buffers and fire them off in bulk, you can no longer surprise the graphics driver with state changes.

The catch is you can't draw things the way you used to so if your rendering code isn't designed the way it excepts, it's much harder to integrate and won't work as efficiently. It's one of the reasons why we dropped legacy OpenGL support in Kex3 not long after Vulkan was officially integrated, as they just worked so fundamentally differently is was causing massive problems with keeping our crossplatform RHI coherent (not impossible, but we simply just didn't have the time, nor suitable hardware to test it anymore).

The id Software folks had a massive leg up, hard to say if John Carmack was originally involved, but they certainly do have former CryEngine programmer Tiago Sousa. They simply just had the right people.
 
GameDev

GameDev

Member
Aug 29, 2018
558
Henrar said:
It's as if Vulkan isn't magic like some gamers hyped it to be.
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No, it is not.

It's not like all the graphics engineers have to do is add in something like:
C++: 
if( vulkanIsSupported() )
{
    graphics.TightenUp();
}

Vulkan gives you a ton of fine grained control, but it also gives even more things you're responsible for. The first Vulkan book I read took 471 pages (out of 661 pages) to get to the vkCmdDraw function to draw your first polygon. You have to clear 70% of the book before getting to basic geometry rendering because Vulkan requires developers to handle so much stuff the driver used to handle for them. This gives them a ton of room for optimizations, but also a ton of room for errors to pop up.
 
Chiramii

Chiramii

Member
Oct 25, 2017
1,666
Norway
0451 said:
The Vulkan support in Rainbow Six Siege has been pretty good in my experience.
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I was about to post the exact same thing. Not only that, I've also never seen a game where DLSS works as good. With every setting maxxed I went from 75 to 250+ frames per second by enabling the "quality" DLSS preset.
 
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