David Airlie Tries DOOM On CPU-Based Lavapipe Vulkan

Red Hat graphics driver developer David Airlie has tried running the DOOM (2016) game on the CPU-based Lavapipe Vulkan driver... It works, but isn't fast and currently requires some hacks.

After trying The Talos Principle on Lavapipe and finding it randomly crashes at start-up and Rise of the Tomb Raider renders slowly up to the menu stage, the longtime open-source GPU driver developer then decided to try DOOM. With some Lavapipe hacks he did manage to get the game to load.

But for getting the DOOM game to load with Lavapipe, it's rendering at around five to six seconds per frame... Yes, not even 5~6 FPS but multiple seconds per frame. There is some hope as much of the overhead is due to BPTC texture loading that Airlie hasn't yet optimized for Lavapipe, but still, those dreaming of real and legitimate gaming with Lavapipe on the CPU with modern CPUs are still living on a fantasy island.

In any case, stop by Airlie's blog if wanting to see a render of DOOM on this Mesa CPU-based Vulkan implementation.