Shipping a standalone game with Vulkan or OpenGL?

[Tormentor667]

Dear ZDoomers,

we are currently preparing the assets for the release of Blade of Agony. For this, we set a few options an variables for the standalone version like effects and video settings. Right now, we wonder, which renderer should be used by default - Vulkan or OpenGL. Any experiences regarding this? What would people here suggest?

Best regards,
Torm

[wildweasel]

Offer players the choice up front. Depending on the player's hardware configuration, Vulkan could either be a silver bullet, or not even supported.

[Nash]

Not every computer supports Vulkan - trying to default-run GZDoom with Vulkan on a computer that doesn't support it will simply crash the app on startup, causing the user to perceive the app as broken.

[Tormentor667]

Not every computer supports Vulkan - trying to default-run GZDoom with Vulkan on a computer that doesn't support it will simply crash the app on startup, causing the user to perceive the app as broken.

That's indeed a problem then, so if Vulkan fails, the engine doesn't fall back to OpenGL, right? Instead we should not force any renderer but instead recommend to use Vulkan?

[Rachael]

The engine will fall back to OpenGL in 99% of cases, but there's always that one user with an unusual configuration ....

You should be safe shipping it as Vulkan, and might even be a good idea, since ATI's do not handle OpenGL very well.

[Nash]

Hmm, that wasn't my experience. Sometimes I will bring over my entire GZDoom folder to play on other computers, taken from my home computer which is set to Vulkan. Sometimes, I'll forget to set it back to OpenGL and depending on the computer I attempt to run my portable GZ folder on - the app will crash if said computer can't do Vulkan.

[KynikossDragonn]

I really wouldn't advocate for specifically only having one renderer with a game. OpenGL should be a good "one size fits all" option, Vulkan for the really higher end hardware and especially AMD/ATI cards so they don't have to deal with the arbitrarily poor OpenGL support those cards have.

I personally have problems with GZDoom's Vulkan under Intel's Vulkan drivers on Linux but it doesn't outright crash or produce wildly incorrect results, so I'd like to beable to stick with OpenGL just to avoid the problems I have with Vulkan.

[Rachael]

No one is advocating for a single renderer. He's just asking if it would be better to ship BOA with Vulkan instead of OpenGL.

And I got to be honest here - BOA is not exactly lightweight enough that I would think a system that can't run Vulkan would even be able to handle BOA to begin with.

[Graf Zahl]

I think the last generation of high end pre-Vulkan cards would be able to handle it. But even these cards are 8 years old by now.
Anybody having purchased a non-Vulkan system after 2013 won't have much fun with this mod - the cards are simply too weak for these highly detailed maps.

But there's another thing to consider: The Vulkan renderer keeps a copy of each texture in the main RAM so its memory requirements are considerably higher!

[Ozymandias81]

I am happy that last Christmas I managed to improve my pc performance with a nVidia GeForce GT 1030 2gb and 8gb of ram ddr3 1600mhz, it already makes a difference and I can enjoy both Vulkan/OpenGL with quite any kind of games pre-2017 at full speed ( Doom 2016 for example ). So the Vulkan renderer is still not perfect unlike the OpenGL on GZDoom? Lol I even tested BoA under SoftPoly... a nightmare obviously. Also I wonder... why GZDoom is capped at 200fps max? I get over 1400 with Zandronum or ZDoom with vanilla Doom

[phantombeta]

Also I wonder... why GZDoom is capped at 200fps max? I get over 1400 with Zandronum or ZDoom with vanilla Doom :lol:

That's because most (if not all) ZDoom family ports have a CVar called "vid_maxfps", which defaults to 200. And it does exactly what it sounds like it does.

[Graf Zahl]

Why do you need more? No monitor in existence can process it. It only wastes more energy and heats up your computer.
Uncapped it should run at ~600-800 fps on simple maps. More is not possible due to fixed per-frame overhead that is a bit higher than on the older ports.

[dpJudas]

Actually, the Asus PG259QN can do 360 hz. vid_maxfps should probably be bumped up to 400.

Sadly one of the side effects of owning a faster gaming monitor is that Doom no longer runs smooth on them for all the levels that kept on adding more and more details until it just barely ran smooth at 60 fps.

[Graf Zahl]

What's the point of a monitor running at a refresh rate no game can keep up with?
That may make sense in some scientific environments but not for gaming. At some point you just run out of time...

[Rachael]

I have a FreeSync monitor and I can tell the difference, it's huge.