Doom - Vulkan
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Absurdly violent and increasingly gruesome at every turn. It's fast, it's frantic, it's Doom. A game that needs no introduction to PC enthusiasts, this 2016 reboot brings hell's evil forces to life with updated visuals and is without a doubt one of the most eagerly anticipated launches in years.
Doom is useful as it can be run via the Vulkan API. Our usual performance measurement tool, FRAPS, doesn't work under Vulkan so another approach is needed. Until the tool is updated, which the developer has hinted at will be quite soon, we're using PresentMon to evaluate performance.
PresentMon is more convoluted as it calculates the time between intervals and then spits it out into a .csv file from which you can pull an average. It doesn't offer a minimum framerate, as evaluated over a full second, so we're sticking with the average for now.
What we see is a small drop-off in performance for the Strix GTX 1060 OC when moving from OpenGL to Vulkan. The Radeon RX 480, on the other hand, has substantial increases at all resolutions; enough for it to easily outpace the GeForce run via either API. Improvements are 40 per cent at 1080p, 30 per cent at 1440p and close to 25 per cent at 4K. Remember, we're benchmarking the same scene and runaround.
This brings home the importance of software as much as hardware and also serves to show why 'hardware-inferior' consoles can offer a compelling gaming experience that wouldn't necessarily be possible on a PC of the same specification.
A clear win for the Strix RX 480 here, then.
