Current state of GZDoom on AMD

[Xaser]

Hey folks,

Thanks to the Doom 2016 Beta, I'm finding myself in search of a graphics card upgrade... *insert grumbling here*

Historically I've shied away from AMD (formerly ATI) cards solely because Radeon drivers have been notoriously wonky with GZDoom, but that's based on secondhand experiences from several years ago. Hence my question: has the situation gotten any better, by chance?

Broadly asking, for anyone with AMD cards: what are your experiences? Does GZDoom work okay or is it still an "Nvidia or Bust" environment?


[ITT: guy makes decision on buying a GPU based on performance of an engine for a 22+ year old game.]

[Caligari87]

I personally have never had an AMD card, and I'm completely happy with nVidia, so if that's worked for you so far I see no reason to recommend a change. Besides, I think a lot of developers are thinking of moving away from DirectX, and nVidia historically has better OpenGL support so it's a safe bet going forward,

[Graf Zahl]

Broadly asking, for anyone with AMD cards: what are your experiences? Does GZDoom work okay or is it still an "Nvidia or Bust" environment?
]

I haven't heard of problems for quite some time now, aside from old deprecated hardware for which driver supoort has stopped.

But there's another thing to consider: AMD's GL drivers are quite a bit slower than NVidia's and is very badly optimized to old style GL with a very high drawcalls to polygon ratio like Doom requires.
And this hasn't improved at all.

[YukiHerz]

The fact that the latest non 1.x GZDoom runs fine on my assed laptop from 4 or 5 years ago with a Radeon HD 6250 and a processor equally as low end makes me laugh.

[leileilol]

then you're not doing it right. you're supposed to run gzdoom on maps with irresponsible inefficient uses of gratuitously copious lines, sectors, and dynamic lights (as static lights) before judging an amd video chipset

[ibm5155]

Ignoring the part that gzdoom is broken with dynamic lights on AMD GPUs http://forum.drdteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=6723 http://forum.drdteam.org/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=6765
The rest Works fine on AMD GPU...
Just a note, I heard that the dynamic light bug doesn't happen when using Reshade on AMD gpua

EDIT: Since the new AMD drivers fixed many opengl iuses (Now I can play with the "hg_the_timeless_final" demoscene without any glitches), I shall give a try again to play gzdoom on the dedicated gpu

[Graf Zahl]

The dynamic light bug has something to do with losing a GPU buffer, although without any means to test it's hard to say what exactly happens here. Reshade and stuff like that intercepts many OpenGL features so it may just hide the driver bug.

[Blzut3]

Now I'm not a GZDoom user, but for whatever it's worth a brief look doesn't show any obvious problems. My card (W7100) is similar to an R9 285/380. For the most part hundreds of frames per second except with Urban Brawl which drops close to 60fps. This is with the Linux fglrx driver of course.

[Graf Zahl]

If you want to do a real stress test to see how good it is you should check Frozen Time, at the start of the wide open area looking across the bridge.

[Blzut3]

18fps regardless of resolution (so presumably CPU limited by Core i5-760). I'll give it a try on Windows later and see if it's any better. (I've seen benchmarks showing that AMD's Linux driver lags in performance behind Windows.)

[Blzut3]

Windows 10 gives a CPU limited 21fps. Played around with the options and the sort by texture option boosted the frame rate to 27fps.

[Graf Zahl]

Better say 'driver limited'. Most of that time is lost in the draw calls which are 10-20x slower than with NVidia's drivers. And that has been a consistent problem for many, many years now. It was this bad in 2007 when I got my first GL3 compatible graphics card and they haven't managed to improve this one bit. On D3D they seem to have the same problem from what I read.

It's all heavily optimized for new games with stuff requiring some edge case performance falling off.

[Nevander]

I'm on an R9 270X myself and GZDoom tends to run smooth 99% of the time. Only see minor slowdowns in heavy areas in the majority of maps. There are of course major slowdowns in maps like Frozen Time (as mentioned), Hellbound's MAP29, and some maps from Sunlust.

There's also this weird non-FPS related stuttering that I can't seem to pinpoint. It happens outside of GZDoom, so it must be a driver issue if it happens in other places. The even weirder thing is if I record with FRAPS, it completely goes away.