Back a few months ago in May, DOOM was finally released for Microsoft’s Xbox One console. Today, and as noted by Windows Central, DOOM developers id Software have announced that Vulkan graphics API support is now live for the title.
The Vulkan graphics API support should not only give you a good experience if you’re using an older graphics card, but should also make DOOM feel much smoother in general. If you did not already know, Vulkan graphics API is a cutting-edge next-generation graphics and compute API from the Khronos Group. The Vulcan API targets high-performance real-time 3D graphics applications such as games and interactive media across all platforms. It ultimately offers higher performance and lower CPU usage, moving most of the driver overhead into the developers’ hands.
In a blog post about Vulkan API support, Bethesda and id Software say,
“Today we’re excited to share another big technology push: Vulkan support is now live on PC… 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.”
This is a huge step forward for the adoption of the Vulkan graphics API. Bethesda has been working with both AMD and NVDIA since March 2016 to help bring Vulkan driver support live to the community.
