Doom now has been updated with the highly anticipated Vulkan support and AMD claims that it has provided a huge boost in framerates for users of their Radeon RX 480 video cards powered by Polaris.
Bethesda launched Doom as an optimized game for most hardware setups but the new Vulkan support ensures that it would run even better with older hardware. It is rare for an AAA game today to look and run good at the same time which makes it as one of the playable games in 2016.
The game can now be played using OpenGL or the new Vulkan rendering backends. Doom is now considered to be one of the first performance-intensive games to use the new low-level API from Khronos for improving the performance and not just to prove that it can be done, Anandtech has learned.
Despite the newfound support of the Doom Vulkan update for older video cards, id still does not recommend using it with some NVIDIA Kepler GPUs with 2GB VRAM and under Windows 7. With the new cheap GTX 1070, RX 480 and the upcoming GTX 1060 cards, it would be best for users to update their hardware for better performance for all other games besides Doom.
While NVIDIA did not claim any performance improvements with the new Doom update, AMD is eager to share their results. The company claims that the Doom Vulkan API update gave 27 percent better performance for the Radeon RX 480 in 1080p and 23 percent more in 1440p, Extremetech reported.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA's GTX 1070 did not show much improvements with the new Vulkan API for Doom. There were two to three more frames added when Guru3D ran it in 1440p and 4K but it stayed flat for the 1080p test.
AMD's Radeon RX 480 card improvements with the new Doom patch is not surprising at all considering that the Vulkan API came from the company's Mantle API that is considered to be the direct counterpart of DirectX 12, where NVIDIA's GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 cards soar.
Doom players can get the Vulkan API patch update through Steam. They are recommended to be run with the new RX 480 drivers from AMD and the new 380.69 GeForce driver for NVIDIA's GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 cards.