Feral Interactive Vulkan-izes Mad Max

[predator7]

Is it possible to run it with AMD Gpu's and especially AMDGPU/MESA ?

[Tuxee]

Why do they keep optimizing old games? Mad Max is two years old, no DLC. I'm pretty sure everyone that was going to play the game already has, and isn't going back.

(a) Mad Max on Linux is about 6 months old.
(b) Bought it then, but haven't played it so far.

Conclusion: I can now play Mad Max in all its glory with the details ramped up.

[Xaero_Vincent]

Those GOL Vulkan results are outstanding. Currently playing Mad Max on Windows but now wanting to try it on Linux. Great job Feral!

[raonlinux]

Is it possible to run it with AMD Gpu's and especially AMDGPU/MESA ?

According to the facebook you must run with mesa 17 any newer one. So let wait Michael do his job.

[M@GOid]

Awesome.

[ramrod]

Why do they keep optimizing old games? Mad Max is two years old, no DLC. I'm pretty sure everyone that was going to play the game already has, and isn't going back.

It's not like the work they put into this Vulkan port will only be beneficial to this one older game.

[M@yeulC]

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 GOL:

How is the performance near Gastown? This was the most demanding area in the OpenGL version.

Ok, wow. I am blown away by the difference. And this is no demo but a real world example. Utterly promising.

Please Feral dude, stop by and explain to us why exactly the difference is this major, even on a ported title?

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.

wait, this is a linux only feature or windows is supported?

Linux only.

[chimpy]

Maybe there's a Windows Vulkan version in the works? Either way this is awesome, and Feral like the post above says, just "Vulkanize Everything!"

[Xaero_Vincent]

Feral was explaining on GOL that the massive improvement is mainly because on OpenGL, the game was bottlenecked by the CPU by being single threaded. Vulkan lets the game stretch it's legs and use multi-threading properly, with much more efficient CPU and GPU usage. Deus Ex next maybe? But yes... More Vulkan please .

[dungeon]

So Michael's Ryzen mobo died just before it should show more cores value here