Vulkan 1.0.64 Adds In Another AMD-Developed Extension

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Vulkan 1.0.64 Adds In Another AMD-Developed Extension

Vulkan 1.0.64 is out this weekend as the newest specification refinement to this high-performance graphics/compute API...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Vulkan-1.0.64-Released

[anolting]

What makes really wondering is the fact that it looks like (based on Michaels tests) that the Vulkan api doesn't seem to be that much faster as other api, specifically if you look how it is promoted. The advantages in case of programming this api is out of scope here. Or do I have a wrong impression?

[Masush5]

What makes really wondering is the fact that it looks like (based on Michaels tests) that the Vulkan api doesn't seem to be that much faster as other api, specifically if you look how it is promoted. The advantages in case of programming this api is out of scope here. Or do I have a wrong impression?

It's more like it's designed in a way to make it possible to create implementation with better performance and less overhead.
It does not necessarily mean that every vulkan driver or ever renderer using vulkan will always be faster than their OpenGL equivalent, only that their performance potential is not bottlenecked by mandated behavior of older API's.

[tambre]

What makes really wondering is the fact that it looks like (based on Michaels tests) that the Vulkan api doesn't seem to be that much faster as other api, specifically if you look how it is promoted. The advantages in case of programming this api is out of scope here. Or do I have a wrong impression?

It's faster, if you actually specifically write the whole thing for Vulkan and don't abstract it away too much. That means that taking advantage of it requires the whole game or game engine to be built/programmed specifically for Vulkan (or maintaining a huge completely separate rendering path). No game developers will rewrite their engine and make it Vulkan-only, as long as most of their userbase doesn't have Vulkan-capable hardware. That's a long while out.

As far as I know, most bigger engines with Vulkan support abstract it away, as if were one of the older APIs. This means they hardly ever use the extra control Vulkan gives you to help you avoid driver overhead and thus the gains in framerate are fairly small.
That said, CPU usage reduction in most games is still somewhat noticeable (for me). Right now there aren't many engines really using Vulkan to its full potential, so the gains will be very small or only in CPU-bound scenarios.

[Drago]

What makes really wondering is the fact that it looks like (based on Michaels tests) that the Vulkan api doesn't seem to be that much faster as other api, specifically if you look how it is promoted. The advantages in case of programming this api is out of scope here. Or do I have a wrong impression?

Look at the difference for DOOM on OGL and Vulkan, especially on AMD GPUs. Vulkan can help with the overhead, but again this is not magic and is dependent on the Devs competence. In this case the guys from "id" did a fantastic job.

[BNieuwenhuizen]

I think Vulkan was never meant to make everything faster, especially not for high end desktops.

The performance benefits are in
- CPU overhead (and a further reduction by being able to multithread)
- Tiling GPUs (such as common in mobile)

In the Phoronix benchmarks you typically have much less advantage because the CPU is fast and has enough cores to offload a lot of the driver work.

The big advantage in vulkan is predictability. There are much less corner cases to fall into that give very bad performance.

The performance story is of course not helped by the fact that most of the games still use an engine designed for GL/D3D11, which makes using vulkan optimally kind of a bother.

[ramrod]

What makes really wondering is the fact that it looks like (based on Michaels tests) that the Vulkan api doesn't seem to be that much faster as other api, specifically if you look how it is promoted. The advantages in case of programming this api is out of scope here. Or do I have a wrong impression?

I have an A10-7850k APU in my living room that I regularly game on, and I can assure you that Vulkan makes a substantial difference in performance when gaming on a PC with an underpowered CPU.