Steam Client Stable vs. Beta Tests With Vulkan On AMDGPU-PRO

[AsuMagic]

You raise an interesting problem with Vulkan and DX12: All this low-level power also gives developers power to shoot themselves in the foot. Valve is pretty good about tracking down and fixing the issues, but by no means are all game developers as skilled as Valve.

For what it's worth, similar problems can go with OpenGL.

[darkbasic]

You raise an interesting problem with Vulkan and DX12: All this low-level power also gives developers power to shoot themselves in the foot. Valve is pretty good about tracking down and fixing the issues, but by no means are all game developers as skilled as Valve.

Non-skilled developers should simply stick to OpenGL or simply use an engine made by someone else. Vulkan is an alternative to OpenGL, not a replacement.

[hansg]

You raise an interesting problem with Vulkan and DX12: All this low-level power also gives developers power to shoot themselves in the foot. Valve is pretty good about tracking down and fixing the issues, but by no means are all game developers as skilled as Valve.

Is it really any more complex than the resource tracking any normal piece of software must already do anyway? And if it is, why?

[eydee]

I don't keep any Windows installs around on any routine basis.

Unless all your test farm has 8GB SSDs only, you could set them up for dual booting. Of just sell all the wasted empty HDD space and there you have your sponsorship.

[Michael]

Would be nice to read about the other system specs you use for testing (CPU, RAM, clocks). Then, you could do like a broadcast and ask community members to test on their Windows, as I think a decent amount still plays on Windows. If interesting results come in, you could as well place them next to yours in such an article?



btw: seems like the steam beta client changes just made it into the final release

OpenBenchmarking.org always records and makers available such data.

[Michael]

Unless all your test farm has 8GB SSDs only, you could set them up for dual booting. Of just sell all the wasted empty HDD space and there you have your sponsorship.

It's a matter of setting up and maintaining Windows installations takes lots of time, routinely needing to reinstall if not activating them, etc.

And most of my test systems have only 120GB SSDs, which get rather filled up just having Linux plus a few Steam games.

[johnc]

Valve is pretty good about tracking down and fixing the issues, but by no means are all game developers as skilled as Valve.

Ok I actually got a pretty good laugh on that one. Have you seen the bug tracker on github?

[starshipeleven]

You raise an interesting problem with Vulkan and DX12: All this low-level power also gives developers power to shoot themselves in the foot. Valve is pretty good about tracking down and fixing the issues, but by no means are all game developers as skilled as Valve.

Using pre-made game engines is the solution. It's not like there aren't like 3 or 4 different kinds out there.

[tegs]

Using pre-made game engines is the solution. It's not like there aren't like 3 or 4 different kinds out there.

Here's to hoping Unreal Engine 4 adds proper support for Vulkan soon, since they are only offering it for Android at this point.

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

At 1920x1080 it appears that AMD cards hit the CPU limit sooner than Nvidia, which seems weird.

At 4K the cards perform very similarly to DX11 benchmarks. You'd expect a bit better with Vulkan. However, maybe Dota 2 doesn't use async compute.

It's not that weird! There's a very lon thread in the german forum of the magazine "Hardwareluxx" about that issue (with DirectX, Windows):

http://www.hardwareluxx.de/community/f14/amd-und-die-bescheidene-performance-im-dx11-cpu-limit-1089150.html

Seems to be the bottleneck of AMD anyway. Any idea about that, bridgman?


@Michael: Thank you very much for retesting! Now we could see the 290 seems to perform not too bad! Strange thing: The 285 didn't gain that much of a performance improvement. By the way: The 390 should be working with AMDGPU as well, right? Since it's just a rebrand... If Polaris will perform well under Linux I'll definetely get one (480(x))!