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Looks like Dota 2 with Vulkan isn't too far away

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It sounds like Dota 2 with Vulkan isn't far off, as an Intel developer working on mesa has had access to it.

QuoteWe have had early access to a few apps. I've almost got dota2 working
(still fighting a rendering corruption), but the driver seems to be working
pretty well. I think we're doing pretty good on the stability front, but
driver isn't quite up to the same performance standards as the GL driver.
Not a problem with Vulkan, more that this is a new driver and we haven't
had time to do everything yet.

What's left to be done? Well, there are some hardware optimizations we
haven't turned on yet such as HiZ. There are also a few compiler things
that need to be done. The one big gaping hole is that NIR doesn't have
loop unrolling yet. Thomas Helland was working on that over the summer but
his time was divided between loop unrolling and range analysis and so it
never got finished.
--Jason

Source

Remember though, it probably won't perform as well as OpenGL when it's first released much like The Talos Principle beta. The first step is to get Vulkan working in games, the next thing is performance. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Vulkan
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wvstolzing Feb 21, 2016
You know what would be a great game under Vulkan?

A really good Star Trek RPG. ;)
tuubi Feb 21, 2016
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Quoting: TheBossRemember though, it probably won't perform as well as OpenGL when it's first released much like The Talos Principle beta.
This also highlights the fact that although Croteam's code might be slow right now, Nvidia's Vulkan driver is unlikely to be well optimized at this point either. I guess it's pretty hard to optimize a driver until there are real world apps/games using the API to test with. Isolated, synthetic tests are unlikely to reflect real world use cases. I'm sure all the big IHV's will get there eventually, and relatively quickly due to Vulkan's design.
SketchStick Feb 21, 2016
Quoting: tuubiThis also highlights the fact that although Croteam's code might be slow right now, Nvidia's Vulkan driver is unlikely to be well optimized at this point either. I guess it's pretty hard to optimize a driver until there are real world apps/games using the API to test with. Isolated, synthetic tests are unlikely to reflect real world use cases. I'm sure all the big IHV's will get there eventually, and relatively quickly due to Vulkan's design.

I don't think we can really assume that the driver is responsible for the performance issues, especially since Vulkan moves a lot of that responsibility out of the driver. Hell it might not even be the game engine, for all we know the shader compiler could be affecting the performance too. There's no point in pinning the blame on anyone at this point because nearly every part of the pipeline is still rough around the edges and there's still a lot of work to be done.
Liam Dawe Feb 21, 2016
Quoting: SketchStick
Quoting: tuubiThis also highlights the fact that although Croteam's code might be slow right now, Nvidia's Vulkan driver is unlikely to be well optimized at this point either. I guess it's pretty hard to optimize a driver until there are real world apps/games using the API to test with. Isolated, synthetic tests are unlikely to reflect real world use cases. I'm sure all the big IHV's will get there eventually, and relatively quickly due to Vulkan's design.

I don't think we can really assume that the driver is responsible for the performance issues, especially since Vulkan moves a lot of that responsibility out of the driver. Hell it might not even be the game engine, for all we know the shader compiler could be affecting the performance too. There's no point in pinning the blame on anyone at this point because nearly every part of the pipeline is still rough around the edges and there's still a lot of work to be done.

Croteam clearly stated they aren't doing any multithreading in Vulkan at the moment, which would be a reason why Talos with Vulkan is slow.
Krogash86 Feb 21, 2016
Nice i want to play Dota with VULKAN plz Valve ;)
Zelox Feb 21, 2016
cool, Iv been having trubble getting Lol to work in wine.
And I recently started to play dota2 again ^^. And this is great news.
kon14 Feb 21, 2016
Quoting: GuestVery nice, can't wait to see it.

And woah if they're not doing multithreading on vulkan, they might as well still be using OpenGL.

They haven't done any optimization yet, they simply got the game running with Vulkan for release, you can read all about their optimization/engine redesign masterplan in the steam forums.


Last edited by kon14 on 21 February 2016 at 4:30 pm UTC
tuubi Feb 21, 2016
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Quoting: TheBossCroteam clearly stated they aren't doing any multithreading in Vulkan at the moment, which would be a reason why Talos with Vulkan is slow.
My point was that their code might not be the only reason. Vulkan drivers are tiny, but as your Intel quote made clear there's still room for optimization. And as SketchStick pointed out, the shader compiler's also fresh off the assembly line and might see a lot of improvement in the near future. In fact we've got a ton of reasons to expect that the infrastructure around Vulkan is pretty high on everyone's to-do lists and we will see the drivers and tools mature at a good pace. I'm sure AMD will catch up as well, as soon as they get the whole AMDGPU transition out of the way.
nifker Feb 21, 2016
Which intel cpus are the minimum to use Vulkan? Is Ivybridge enough?
tuubi Feb 21, 2016
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Quoting: nifkerWhich intel cpus are the minimum to use Vulkan? Is Ivybridge enough?
Quoting: Intel's Vulkan driver announcementThe driver currently supports Sky Lake all the way back to Ivy Bridge. The driver is Vulkan 1.0 conformant for 64-bit builds on Sky Lake, Broadwell, and Braswell. We are still having a couple of 32-bit issues and support for Haswell, Ivy Bridge, and Bay Trail should be considered experimental.
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