Friday, September 16th 2016
AMD Actively Promoting Vulkan Beyond GPUOpen
Vulkan, the new-generation cross-platform 3D graphics API governed by the people behind OpenGL, the Khronos Group, is gaining in relevance, with Google making it the primary 3D graphics API for Android. AMD said that it's actively promoting the API. Responding to a question by TechPowerUp in its recent Radeon Technology Group (RTG) first anniversary presser, its chief Raja Koduri agreed that the company is actively working with developers to add Vulkan to their productions, and optimize them for Radeon GPUs. This, we believe, could be due to one of many strategic reasons.
First, Vulkan works inherently better on AMD Graphics CoreNext GPU architecture because it's been largely derived from Mantle, a now defunct 3D graphics API by AMD that brings a lot of "close-to-metal" API features that make game consoles more performance-efficient, over to the PC ecosystem. The proof of this pudding is the AAA title and 2016 reboot of the iconic first-person shooter "Doom," in which Radeon GPUs get significant performance boosts switching from the default OpenGL renderer to Vulkan. These boosts aren't as pronounced on NVIDIA GPUs.
Second, and this could be a long shot, but the growing popularity of Vulkan could give AMD leverage over Microsoft to steer Direct3D development in areas that AMD GPUs are inherently good at - these include asynchronous compute, and tiled-resources (AMD GPUs benefit due to higher memory bandwidths). AMD has been engaging aggressively with game studios working on AAA games that use DirectX 12, and thus far AMD GPUs have been either gaining or sustaining performance better than NVIDIA GPUs, when switching from DirectX 11 fallbacks to DirectX 12 renderers.
AMD has already "opened" up much of its GPU IP to game developers through its GPUOpen initiative. Here, developers will find detailed technical resources on how to take advantage of not just AMD-specific GPU IP, but also some industry standards. Vulkan is among the richly differentiated resources AMD is giving away through the initiative.
Vulkan still has a long way to go before it becomes the primary API in AAA releases. To most gamers who don't tinker with advanced graphics settings, "Doom" still works on OpenGL. and "Talos Prinicple," works on Direct3D 11 by default, for example. It could be a while before a game runs on Vulkan out of the box, and the way its special interest group Khronos, and more importantly AMD, promote its use, not just during game development, but also long-term support, will have a lot to do with it. A lot will also depend on NVIDIA, which holds about 70% in PC discrete GPU market share, to support the API. Over-customizing Vulkan would send it the way of OpenGL. Too many vendor-specific extensions to keep up drove game developers to Direct3D in the first place.
First, Vulkan works inherently better on AMD Graphics CoreNext GPU architecture because it's been largely derived from Mantle, a now defunct 3D graphics API by AMD that brings a lot of "close-to-metal" API features that make game consoles more performance-efficient, over to the PC ecosystem. The proof of this pudding is the AAA title and 2016 reboot of the iconic first-person shooter "Doom," in which Radeon GPUs get significant performance boosts switching from the default OpenGL renderer to Vulkan. These boosts aren't as pronounced on NVIDIA GPUs.
AMD has already "opened" up much of its GPU IP to game developers through its GPUOpen initiative. Here, developers will find detailed technical resources on how to take advantage of not just AMD-specific GPU IP, but also some industry standards. Vulkan is among the richly differentiated resources AMD is giving away through the initiative.
Vulkan still has a long way to go before it becomes the primary API in AAA releases. To most gamers who don't tinker with advanced graphics settings, "Doom" still works on OpenGL. and "Talos Prinicple," works on Direct3D 11 by default, for example. It could be a while before a game runs on Vulkan out of the box, and the way its special interest group Khronos, and more importantly AMD, promote its use, not just during game development, but also long-term support, will have a lot to do with it. A lot will also depend on NVIDIA, which holds about 70% in PC discrete GPU market share, to support the API. Over-customizing Vulkan would send it the way of OpenGL. Too many vendor-specific extensions to keep up drove game developers to Direct3D in the first place.
111 Comments on AMD Actively Promoting Vulkan Beyond GPUOpen
I get that you like your cards, and that's cool - but benchmarks are benchmarks, the Fury is nowhere near beating the 1070...
And it won't - in maybe 2-3 titles it will match the 1070, beat it by very little, but it will lose in a large majority of the rest... thats what i mean by false hope. It's just not true.
and AMD markets it and people like you believe it and go out buying $310 Furies thinking they'e beating 1070's ... when they're not. This is my problem with these types of PR campaigns.
Given the driver optimisations AMD perform, it gained performance over the years. The 680 didn't because Nvidia get DX11 driver optimisations very quickly.
The question is, are you buying a card for now or two years down the line? You seem to take a hugely AMD slanted bias. I've seen your posts on other forums and it's clear you're a hater, you lack balance. For all your precise arguments, like any hater, you tend to use slanted evidence or ignore standard business practice.
I own a 980ti and it chuckles me to see it perform on par with a Fury X. Now that's in a DX11 version of a Gaming Evolved title. Sure, in DX12 the Fury X will gain some frames but why should I cry? I played the game at 1440p with very high settings (some maxed) at about 60fps. It was excellent.
In Doom Vulkan I was on far higher fps. Yes a Fury X would have got more but I've got a 60hz monitor. My gaming experiences have been great.
I bought the card a year ago. It hasn't let me down.
Going forward, I am no fan of Nvidia. I won't spend the money for a 1080, 1080ti or above because Vega is only 6 months away (hopefully at most). If Vega has a better perf/watt than Polaris and it's a far bigger chip it should match the 1080 in DX11 and it should absolutely own the bare metal API's. So Nvidia won't see my money again until Volta and even then, that's only if it performs.
So if Vega is twice as good as a 480, I'm on that next. But the reason I have no reason to move from my 980ti is because it still performs very, very well. If I can play AAA Gaming Evolved titles with butter smooth frames, I have nothing to feel cheated about. Only children get upset because someone elses card plays it faster than theirs.
Oh and one more thing, my Powecolor LCD 7970 clocked to the 1300 catslyst maximum. My MSI version (under an EKWB) only managed 1225.
I had more fun overclocking my original Titan using the voltage soft mod. I can't remember the clocks but they were scary for such a card. Two of those cards got recycled in TPU.
- Often no FPS-Gains for slower CPUs
- sadly most DX11 to DX12 shifts stay fokused on strong single-thread-Perf like all DX before
Vulkan resulting from Mantle does everything better on weak Hardware, logically because the Consoles use 8 weak Cores so the work needs to be ballanced as good as possible between ALL available Hardware
this Chart is old but i can´t show it often enough:
Fact the 290X theoretically is way stronger than a GTX 780GHz
Feeding the GTX in DX11 is done with less CPU-Load over the 290X resulting in higher FPS on every CPU in DX11 (you get the max Perf out of it easier)
- the Gains the 290X gets in Mantle are mostly from feeding it better with the CPU
- the impressive Mantle-Leads over Nvidia-DX11 are only done between the "lowest 4-Thread CPU" and the "highest non-k i5"
"On the 2 strongest CPUs" the 290X can close the Gap to DX11 because the GPU Utilization was bad in DX11, but it can´t beat the GTX
- because DX11-Language can´t be ballanced in the GCN GPU good enough because GCN is very compute-oriented. It needs compute-Shaders etc. to get fully utilized, DX11 mostly isn´t used like that.
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Sadly DX12 seems to not focus on giving us more FPS with cheaper CPUs, no it just makes new Games on $1500+ Rigs look better
I´m a person being satisfied with for example a GTA without Temporal-Aliasing and Flickering-Edges and Tearing and Input-Lag
With a Budget for CPU+GPU of upto $350 ... for example i3-6100 with RX470 4GB
that could be done with DX12 or Vulkan
Also, are you basing your Vulkan performance evaluation on something more than just Doom?
Edit: Mind you, while everybody was quick to point out how much more Polaris benefits from Vulkan in Doom, nobody was equally quick to measure the power consumption at the same time.
Nvidia is not only a member, their president Neil Trevett is an Nvidia employee. Nvidia started OpenGL ES, and have been the major contributor to OpenGL (post 2.0), OpenCL, and also Vulkan. There is no doubt that they are dedicated to adding support and evolving the APIs.
Every time I see the point brought up, I think of a parrot; "Power Consumption, the Power Consumption...caw caw rawwwk!" .
@Ungari
People are funny. They bitch over power consumption of graphic cards where it's like 50W difference. But when it comes to home appliances like fridges or tumble dryers, they don't care even for 100kW of difference per year.Like you said, it's literally pennies even for such massive differences, those 50W difference is nothing. And it also doesn't reflect as dramatically in terms of thermals. It helps if it's lower, but people tend to blow this stuff way out of proportions.
I'm not suggesting that your card is obsolete right now since Pascal is super-clocked Maxwell, but the lack of Async Compute will certainly be an issue if you ever decide to play these new APIs.What is sad is that just because Nvidia uses it as a selling point in their advertising, tech enthusiasts actually buy into this as being an important criteria in evaluating performance.
You would think that of all people, tech junkies would know better.
Are the current gen consoles also able to support Vulkan? How about PS4-Pro?