GZDoom 4.7.0 released

[Graf Zahl]

On Steam, non-Vulkan hardware is even lower - currently at 3.4%. If you insist on running a 10 year old system without any hardware upgrades it is inevitable that some software will leave you behind.

[sinisterseed]

Or all of it, considering we're talking about games here and they're getting ever more advanced.

One might as well wonder how come none of the recent remasters done by Nightdive are powered by fossils, for instance. Shadow Man, the Turok games, Doom 64, Blood Fresh Supply, Quake remaster, the upcoming Powerslave/Exhumed remaster, and no doubt the Blade Runner and SS2 ones all require modern hardware, the lowest they go is DirectX 11 capable hardware, with very few exceptions. Not to mention the SS2 remaster was recently teased in a tweet to even feature a VR mode for users who want a truly terrific experience - yes, VR, you heard that right.

The logic of "old games must run on old hardware" is flawed, and that's clearly seen in the kind of remasters and source ports (fhDoom, vkQuake/vkQuake 2, to name a few), we are getting these days for said old games, there's really only the more conservative ones that still are capable of running on potatoes. Upgrades are inevitable when it comes to technology in general, and catering to an ever shrinking minority of users is beyond pointless, that way future hardware is just compromised, simply put. And with W11 out and requiring even more modern hardware that's also DX12/Vulkan compatible, catering to legacy hardware has never been more pointless. Let relics be relics and stay that way...

Or just use one of the engines that target old hardware.

[Gez]

and I do not understand why I should buy an unnecessary one to play a 30-year-old game.

GZDoom updates will never change the hardware you need to play vanilla Doom.

Quake remaster

That one's a good example. It only supports Vulkan. No OpenGL at all. (There is still a DirectX mode but it's not officially supported, so if you get problems with it you won't get any help.)

[Graf Zahl]

GZDoom also still runs on 15 year old hardware, provided it's not an ancient Intel Graphics Decelerator - even those had been retired 10 years ago. In the last 8 years, virtually no new hardware has been released that is not Vulkan/DX12 compatible.

[sinisterseed]

GZDoom also still runs on 15 year old hardware.

If speaking of pure GL 3.3 or SoftPoly, then yes.

But that means a barebones experience, no fancy effects or lights, nothing, Gotta cut corners somewhere.

[SLON]

Specifically, my video card is a pretty rare model, and the manufacturer, because of this, does not consider it necessary to bother with Vulcan driver support for it (even if it were possible). So, apparently, there remains either emulation (although I did not see that someone would be doing it thoroughly), or the replacement of "iron".

[Rachael]

Let's hit the elephant in the room then -

What *IS* your video card model - and what operating system are you using?

[SLON]

For the most part, it is pointless to describe it, because even if it were adapted to the Vulcan, it still literally lives out its last days as a more or less "modern card".

Now, in essence, this is go into the self-repetition.
For the most part, all that is needed, is to emphasize that the GZDoom was created specifically for new systems, and only for them.

[Rachael]

Well, complaining about it isn't going to change things. Sorry that the world can't bend over backwards just for your favor.

[axredneck]

Quake remaster

That one's a good example. It only supports Vulkan. No OpenGL at all. (There is still a DirectX mode but it's not officially supported, so if you get problems with it you won't get any help.)

For me DX11 in Quake Remaster has much lower latency than Vulkan, and i'm on Linux.
Sorry for a bit of offtop.

[Enjay]

I have never understood the attitude of "my hardware is old, but new software must run on it".

If your hardware is old, then you pick old programs that were current when your machine was new/the norm. That's what I do with older machines. Why on Earth would anyone expect people to be making software for out-dated hardware?

Yes, there has to be a degree of flexibility within this and, in the case of GZDoom - which enables retro-gaming, it makes sense to support older hardware wherever possible. But things move on and so should the software. People get new hardware, new operating systems and eventually, that becomes the market place norm. It becomes impractical to support the new/current market place and the old dying one that has been eclipsed. So the old one gets dropped. I'm not sure why this approach seems so unreasonable to people.

[Rachael]

This is no defense of it - but I think a lot of it comes from the idea that Doom is exclusively an older game that should only be designed to run on older systems.

But if you're still banging that old 486 clunker around, there's nothing stopping you from running Doom.exe in DOS directly. In fact you need nothing fancy, like Windows 10, or Windows 11, to run it on that hardware - just 4 megs of RAM and good old MS-DOS is all you need.

The thing is though - that's Doom.exe - not GZDoom - and that's where a lot of the misconception comes in.

GZDoom is by no means stopping you in any way from running Doom on such an old PC - it's just simply not the ideal means by which to do so.

And until that idea is more widely explained and understood, there will always be the misconception that GZDoom is poorly optimized and that it is giving the proverbial finger to anyone not running thousand dollar rigs that can be updated every 2 years.

I simply don't know what to say, really. I am fortunate that I have some relatively modern PC's that can do some fairly heavy lifting - and for having support from a dear friend who helped to make that possible - but GZDoom is not exclusively by any means the only thing that I do on them. I actually do have need for this stuff - especially for my professional work.

Anyway - what it boils down to is this - and this really enhances the point that Enjay is trying to make. Nothing's stopping you from playing Doom on an old PC. And truthfully, for the foreseeable future, GZDoom will continue to support OpenGL, GLES, and SoftPoly. They aren't going away anytime soon. However - they are going away eventually - and while you have little worry for the next year or so, now is definitely the time to start saving up for Vulkan-capable hardware. You can find some used on online marketplaces. An investment of no more than $200 or so should net you a fairly decent computer that will be able to run GZDoom for quite a few years to come.

And having been around in ZDoom's early days, I can confidently state that GZDoom's support droppage happens a lot slower than actual advances in technology do. I know it's frustrating to have to buy a new PC every so often - I get it, I really do - but as Enjay said it comes out of necessity, not desire. The desire is to take advantage of newer graphics technologies. And Graf said so himself - he might as well drop GZDoom if he's forced to keep all the old support kludge around that's clogging up the engine. And he's right. If GZDoom is not to advance beyond the point where it is now then what's the point of even working on it to begin with? Sure it's nice to run it on such a wide diversity of machines - both new and old - but it's also a lot nicer for it to run smoother, faster, and more beautifully, and have better features. If 4.8.0 were to drop all classic rendering backends - then 4.7.0 is definitely a solid release to play on for those older systems.

[KynikossDragonn]

My current system is around 6 years old now (discontinued NUC model even) and it runs GZDoom just fine, no need for OpenGL ES either. Vulkan doubles the memory usage (and can potentially trigger stack smashing protection put into place by the compiler) and makes it impossible for me to use nearest neighbor with mipmaps (it just renders everything with linear interpolation if any form of mipmaps are enabled) so I don't use Vulkan at all. But, apart from that it runs about as fine as it possibly can run. OpenGL 4.6 Core and all.

OpenGL 4.6 is the last OpenGL isn't it now? All the API development has shifted to Vulkan? Well hopefully someone can figure out why mipmaps cause everything to go into linear filtering mode on Intel, I don't get that problem with vkQuake; only GZDoom.

[Graf Zahl]

When we are talking about a time after OpenGL it most likely won't be the current Vulkan backend. We all know it has some serious issues, like needing more memory, or being a bit abort-happy. It is currently missing any kind of decent memory management, which is acceptable for the average Doom map on an average system, but it's really not what I'd consider the optimal solution.

The main reason why nothing happens here is lack of time.
But regardless of that, OpenGL's days are numbered. Right now it is still essential due to professional software depending on it, but once this software has been ported to something more modern I am fairly certain that OpenGL will eventually be removed from graphics drivers and be replaced by a wrapper around D3D12 or Vulkan. And I am not convinced that this can be done without some performance impact.

[KynikossDragonn]

I am fairly certain that OpenGL will eventually be removed from graphics drivers and be replaced by a wrapper around D3D12 or Vulkan.

There's already a OpenGL -> Vulkan driver in Mesa called "Zink", but it's still very much WIP software. I wont be surprised if it reaches a point it just replaces the default OpenGL implementation at some point in time.