The PC Version of DOOM Now Supports Vulkan

It’s true that DOOM is a decently optimized game that runs well on both consoles and the PC, but it looks like the PC version has just got a major advantage with the implementation of Vulkan support. The new API has been confirmed by id Software’s Robert Duffy in a new post published on Bethesda’s own website, and it looks like those of you who are planning to play the game on older GPUs have a good reason to be excited. Apparently, Vulkan will make DOOM run smoother on older configurations, but you should know that you might also encounter some unpleasant issues, which is to be expected from a triple A game running on a new API.

“When we were looking to adopt Vulkan for DOOM, the main question we asked ourselves was: “What’s the gamer benefit?” Ultimately the biggest benefit will be high framerates. There are a number of game-focused reasons super-high framerates matter, but primarily its movement and player feel. The game just feels amazing running that fast, so we made it a priority to try to really exploit the available hardware on PC. We also anticipate some older GPUs will now be able to play the game at good framerates. We hope the range of GPU support widens with additional game and driver updates. That said, this is the first time a triple-A game is releasing on a brand-new API and brand-new drivers so there may be a few bumps, but our testing is showing really great performance and stability.”

Just in case you’re not familiar with Vulkan, it is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API that was announced for the first time at GDC 2015 by the Khronos Group. The project relied heavily on components borrowed from AMD’s Mantle, and it was designed to standardize across the industry in a similar fashion to the old OpenGL. Only a few other games apart from DOOM support Vulkan at the time of writing, namely Ashes of the Singularity, DOTA 2 and The Talos Principle.