Feral Interactive Vulkan-izes Mad Max

[edddeduck_feral]

I can almost imagine Michael rushing to perform some benchmarks.

Yes, it works with open drivers (mesa 17.1+). Just keep in mind that the new benchmark mode is focused on the CPU-BOUND areas of the game. As such, it might be a best-case scenario for Vulkan.

Relevant quote from [click here if you want to read it all]

Correct, this bit is the key takeaway.

For the most part Mad Max on GL is CPU bound - ie. limited by the single threaded CPU performance on the GL thread. We already use a separate thread for GL dispatch but this doesn’t mean GL itself is multithreaded.

Vulkan helps us massively here, as you can see in the graphs, and is almost always GPU bound now. If you've got the time to spec this out you could look into average GPU utilisation (using nvidia-smi) with GL and with Vulkan, and you'll see the difference.

To be clear the benchmark areas are some of the absolute *worst* cases for the CPU, designed that way so we could target the issue directly. That obviously produces some skewed results towards the best case for Vulkan, but I'd hope the jump in performance across the board proves it's not just a one off.

Other games might not get as large a boost, the exact benefits very much depend on if the game is CPU or GPU bound and why.

[M@GOid]

I found a benchmark in Windows, should put gains and losses in perspective:

[oooverclocker]

It runs on Vulkan with Mesa but I don't see any significant increases in performance. The RadeonSI OpenGL implementation seems to be still preferable and produces a smoother frame rate but it looks like RADV is slowly getting closer.

I really hope that AMD will now decide to open source their Vulkan implementation. It looks like the Vulkan train starts rolling more and more and one should be able to plug in the new Vega cards in Ubuntu 17.10 and have instant Vulkan support on the same level like the proprietary drivers provide.

[pmorph]

Huh. . *collects jaw from floor*
I was just ponderin the other day should I purchase this.. guess there's no way to avoid it now.

[towo2099]

Does not start here in debian sid with nvidia 375.39

towo:Defiant> inxi -v3
System:    Host: Defiant Kernel: 4.10.6-towo.1-siduction-amd64 x86_64 (64 bit gcc: 6.3.0)
           Desktop: Cinnamon 3.2.7 (Gtk 3.22.11) Distro: siduction 13.2.0 December - xfce - (201312310323)
Machine:   Device: desktop Mobo: MSI model: H87-G41 PC Mate(MS-7850) v: 1.0 BIOS: American Megatrends v: V3.9 date: 07/17/2014
CPU:       Quad core Intel Core i5-4670K (-MCP-) cache: 6144 KB
           flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx) bmips: 27208
           clock speeds: max: 3401 MHz 1: 3401 MHz 2: 3401 MHz 3: 3401 MHz 4: 3401 MHz
Graphics:  Card: NVIDIA GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti] bus-ID: 01:00.0
           Display Server: X.Org 1.19.3 driver: nvidia Resolution: [email protected]
           GLX Renderer: GeForce GTX 1050 Ti/PCIe/SSE2 GLX Version: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 375.39 Direct Rendering: Yes
Network:   Card: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
           driver: r8169 v: 2.3LK-NAPI port: d000 bus-ID: 03:00.0
           IF: eth0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: 44:8a:5b:2f:3a:bf
Drives:    HDD Total Size: 4250.9GB (25.6% used)
           ID-1: model: Crucial_CT750MX3
           ID-2: model: Crucial_CT500MX2
           ID-3: model: ST3000VN000
Info:      Processes: 217 Uptime: 2:18 Memory: 3513.5/15982.3MB Init: systemd runlevel: 5 Gcc sys: 6.3.0
           Client: Shell (bash 4.4.111) inxi: 2.3.5

Crashdump is saying zero to me, what's wrong. Canging back to the release version is letting the game start again.

[humbug]

Does that mean the openGL implementation was really bad?

Still this is fantastic to see. And very good learning experience for the folks at Feral as they move towards doing more Vulkan development in future. By 2018 I expect all their ports to target Vulkan first.

[humbug]

Yes.

A10-7850K + R9-390 results:

• There is almost no performance difference between Normal and Very High quality settings
• Outdoor scenes without complex buildings: an almost stable 60Hz with VSync enabled
• Outdoor scenes with complex buildings: 45 FPS
• Indoor scene Deep Friah's Temple: minimum 36 FPS, about 45-55 FPS on average
• CPU utilization: MadMax 190% (1*100% + 1*35% + 2*25% + ...), total CPU utilization is about 200%, 4-core CPU
• GPU utilization: 60-70%
• OpenGL / Vulkan driver:
  • 4.5 (Core Profile) Mesa 17.1.0-devel (git-0f9a0cb)
  • Gallium 0.4 on AMD HAWAII (DRM 3.10.0 / 4.11.0-rc4+, LLVM 4.0.0)

The CPU utilization is relatively low.

amdgpu pro will be a lot faster than RadV.

[edddeduck_feral]

Does not start here in debian sid with nvidia 375.39

towo:Defiant> inxi -v3
System: Host: Defiant Kernel: 4.10.6-towo.1-siduction-amd64 x86_64 (64 bit gcc: 6.3.0)
Desktop: Cinnamon 3.2.7 (Gtk 3.22.11) Distro: siduction 13.2.0 December - xfce - (201312310323)
Machine: Device: desktop Mobo: MSI model: H87-G41 PC Mate(MS-7850) v: 1.0 BIOS: American Megatrends v: V3.9 date: 07/17/2014
CPU: Quad core Intel Core i5-4670K (-MCP-) cache: 6144 KB
flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx) bmips: 27208
clock speeds: max: 3401 MHz 1: 3401 MHz 2: 3401 MHz 3: 3401 MHz 4: 3401 MHz
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti] bus-ID: 01:00.0
Display Server: X.Org 1.19.3 driver: nvidia Resolution: [email protected]
GLX Renderer: GeForce GTX 1050 Ti/PCIe/SSE2 GLX Version: 4.5.0 NVIDIA 375.39 Direct Rendering: Yes
Network: Card: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
driver: r8169 v: 2.3LK-NAPI port: d000 bus-ID: 03:00.0
IF: eth0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: 44:8a:5b:2f:3a:bf
Drives: HDD Total Size: 4250.9GB (25.6% used)
ID-1: model: Crucial_CT750MX3
ID-2: model: Crucial_CT500MX2
ID-3: model: ST3000VN000
Info: Processes: 217 Uptime: 2:18 Memory: 3513.5/15982.3MB Init: systemd runlevel: 5 Gcc sys: 6.3.0
Client: Shell (bash 4.4.111) inxi: 2.3.5

Crashdump is saying zero to me, what's wrong. Canging back to the release version is letting the game start again.

Please make sure you provide feedback to the email in our release notes, part of the public beta process is so we can fix bugs (or log driver bugs) so we can find edge cases and issues with the Vulkan implementation. Thanks!

====
The following driver versions are required to participate in the Beta:

NVIDIA
Requires NVIDIA driver version 375.26 or later.

AMDGPU-PRO
Requires 16.50 or 16.60. 16.60 has a known regression which causes the game to appear darker than it should. A driver fix for this is in progress. We’re aware of some rare full system hangs when using GPU-PRO.

MESA (RADV/ANV)
Requires latest Mesa 17.1-dev (as of this post) compiled with Vulkan support. On Ubuntu this can be installed using the Padoka ppa found at https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-...ve/ubuntu/mesa. INTEL ANV requires Broadwell or Skylake, but Haswell is currently unsupported.

Please make sure Steam is up to date (built March 22 2017 or later). This Beta does not currently support SteamOS.

To pass us your feedback, email [email protected] with a support report generated from the options window. Please provide as much detail as possible.

====

[edddeduck_feral]

Does that mean the openGL implementation was really bad?

If you go a few posts higher up we explained the reason for the differences.

For the most part Mad Max on GL is CPU bound - ie. limited by the single threaded CPU performance on the GL thread. We already use a separate thread for GL dispatch but this doesn’t mean GL itself is multithreaded.

Vulkan helps us massively here, as you can see in the graphs, and is almost always GPU bound now. If you've got the time to spec this out you could look into average GPU utilisation (using nvidia-smi) with GL and with Vulkan, and you'll see the difference.

To be clear the benchmark areas are some of the absolute *worst* cases for the CPU, designed that way so we could target the issue directly. That obviously produces some skewed results towards the best case for Vulkan, but I'd hope the jump in performance across the board proves it's not just a one off.

Other games might not get as large a boost, the exact benefits very much depend on if the game is CPU or GPU bound and why.

[nomadewolf]

Vulkan done right!