Quick test: Doom with Volcano – Test

The Volcano interface has been a big snack among enthusiasts lately as a competitor to Microsoft’s DirectX 12 interface. The Volcano is a spiritual development of Mantle, created by AMD and DICE for the game Battlefield 4.

Doom used OpenGL 4.5 at launch, but like many titles for DirectX 12 has had a secondary API pasted afterwards. Vulkan is also based on an interface that works closer to the hardware, which in theory can provide better performance.

The editors are of course curious, and to get some meat on their bones before the autumn tests, Doom will be installed on the test rigs. The goal is to gather experience around how the title behaves in Vulkan, where the title is so far relatively alone with the interface.

The machine used is SweClocker’s standard test system for graphics cards. Installed drivers are latest from AMD and Nvidia, Radeon Software 16.8.2 Hotfix and Nvidia Geforce 372.54 respectively. For more information on the system and test method, see the review of the Sapphire Radeon RX 470.

The settings used are the game’s predefined Ultra, complemented by 8 × TSSAA for canoe leveling and 16 × anisotropic filtering. To calculate frames, the Presentmon tool is used, which is an ETW-based image counter. The software does not have a real user interface, but is usually started via the command prompt.

Note that this is primarily about curious experiments on the editorial board, not a full-scale test. The belief and hope, however, is that even the enthusiasts among SweClocker’s members find the figures interesting.

First out are the popular 1,920 x 1,080 pixels where both Titan X “Pascal” and Geforce GTX 1080 hit the ceiling at 200 frames per second with the Volcano interface. In terms of AMD, the Radeon R9 Fury X gets an increase of around 45 percent with Vulkan activated. All cards get some improvement in Vulcan except for the Geforce GTX 780 Ti, which does not have the same support for close-to-metalinterface as newer cards.

With the resolution in the intermediate stage, the Titan X “Pascal” almost hits the ceiling again and outperforms the Geforce GTX 1080 by about 22 percent. As before, the Radeon R9 Fury X comes out as the top winner with a 37 percent increase in Vulkan, with the Titan X “Pascal” in second place with a 31 percent increase.

Last but not least, the resolution is 3,840 x 2,160 pixels. The results look much smoother among the majority of the cards. Something that stands out is the Radeon R9 Fury X which earns around 42 percent in performance with Vulkan, and the R9 390X with 17 percent performance increase.

Summary thoughts

In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about the next generation API, both DirectX 12 and Vulkan. The former has already found its way to some titles, where the performance can vary enormously depending on the implementation.

It’s harder to say how it is on the other side when Doom is the first big game where Vulkan makes a real difference. However, the interface provides a pleasant increase in performance, but with somewhat varying results between rounds. The implementation of Vulkan is better than in many DirectX 12 titles, but still gives unexpected performance differences despite completely unchanged mode. In terms of results, something seems to put a stop to an increase in performance when it comes to 4K resolution, beyond the hardware bottleneck.

► Read the review of Doom on FZ