LZDoom 4.11.4 03/28/25 released

[Graf Zahl]

Clipping on big maps with lots of 3D floors and overall linedefs seems to be the cause here, in such conditions "stat rendertimes" feature reports clip time around 5.00 whereas in vanilla doom maps it's about 0.04-0.20. Do you have any thoughts on why this happens?

Do 50x the amount of work and it takes 50x longer. Never forget that vanilla allowed 128 visible segs at most, but large maps can have several 1000 visible lines.

[Teddipetzi]

Has anybody else noticed the sharp uptick of LZDoom downloads over the last 6 months?
The numbers are quite easy to compare because they are roughly 2 months apart each - and each new release has higher numbers for its two month period, and for 3.85 they are nearly double that of 3.83a.

I am a bit confused here - why is a legacy port like this increasing its user base? Normally people should upgrade their hardware and move on to the high end product, but for some reason the opposite seems to happen here.

[Graf Zahl]

My guess would be two reasons:

- Some people are still attached to the old font in the menu.
- It may run Brutal Doom better. This should never be underestimated.

it surely has nothing to do with running it on old systems - those are on a general decline.

[Kamil]

Last dev build shows error in Doom 2 - level 1
https://www.dropbox.com/s/srs5vaphgjsx28y/log.rtf?dl=0

[3saster]

My guess would be two reasons:

- Some people are still attached to the old font in the menu.
- It may run Brutal Doom better. This should never be underestimated.

it surely has nothing to do with running it on old systems - those are on a general decline.

It might have something to do with the impression quite a number of people have (I see suggestions to use LZDoom/ZDoom 2.8.1 on DW and Reddit a lot) that if ZDoom/LZDoom can run the mod, it will run it better than GZDoom. This has twisted around into a myth that LZDoom/ZDoom are faster and better ports than GZDoom, even for people with decent computers. Weird how things like that go :/

[Kamil]

Why not make an additional version of the old font for GZDoom? I realized that LZDoom was not created to improve performance, but to support a CPU that does not support OpenGL 3.0 and higher

[TDRR]

This has twisted around into a myth that LZDoom/ZDoom are faster and better ports than GZDoom, even for people with decent computers. Weird how things like that go :/

It's nothing weird or surprising. They are basing their claims off their experience, and if they got an Intel iGPU, then LZDoom more likely than not runs the same mods but at least 1.5x faster. (And, depending on the amount of cores on their CPU, ZDoom may also run MUCH faster)
Source: I have a craptop myself

Why not make an additional version of the old font for GZDoom?

I wonder the same, couldn't it just be done as an addon or something? I mean, I wouldn't stop using LZDoom over GZDoom just because the fonts were reverted, but I imagine a ton of people absolutely would.

[Graf Zahl]

This has twisted around into a myth that LZDoom/ZDoom are faster and better ports than GZDoom, even for people with decent computers. Weird how things like that go :/

It's nothing weird or surprising. They are basing their claims off their experience, and if they got an Intel iGPU, then LZDoom more likely than not runs the same mods but at least 1.5x faster. (And, depending on the amount of cores on their CPU, ZDoom may also run MUCH faster)
Source: I have a craptop myself

At least on modern Intel hardware, GZDoom on Vulkan should run a LOT better. Our internal tests showed that even the oldest still supported Intel iGPU should run just as well with the more recent renderer that received a few optimizations for AMD hardware.

Why not make an additional version of the old font for GZDoom?

I wonder the same, couldn't it just be done as an addon or something? I mean, I wouldn't stop using LZDoom over GZDoom just because the fonts were reverted, but I imagine a ton of people absolutely would.

No, it doesn't work like that. The option menu font was replaced to give more space to the menus' content. If it was reverted to the old ones, several menus wouldn't fit anymore, especially in non-English languages.

[mjr4077au]

At least on modern Intel hardware, GZDoom on Vulkan should run a LOT better. Our internal tests showed that even the oldest still supported Intel iGPU should run just as well with the more recent renderer that received a few optimizations for AMD hardware.

Just curious if that perf improvement is limited to the Intel iGPUs? NVIDIA has always had a solid OpenGL implementation and with GZDoom running a fresh config except for a lifted frame limiter, I get about 75% more FPS out of the OpenGL renderer.

[Graf Zahl]

On NVidia - at least on my system - the performance of both backends is roughly the same, sometimes OpenGL is in front and sometimes Vulkan.

On AMD and Intel the far higher overhead of OpenGL draw calls really makes a difference.


If you say 75%, what map is this about? If you run something at very high frame rates you start measuring things that are mostly irrelevant once performance becomes an issue.

[mjr4077au]

If you say 75%, what map is this about? If you run something at very high frame rates you start measuring things that are mostly irrelevant once performance becomes an issue.

Just the start of E1M1, standing in place at the spawn point. I haven't ran a proper benchmark as such. From the current texture_rework branch under the aforementioned conditions, ~330fps for OGL, ~230fps for Vulkan.

Right on about the irrelevancy, I play with vsync on at 60Hz so could not care less

[Graf Zahl]

Yes, that's not really surprising, what you see there is the optimizations in NVidia's GL driver. But when maps get larger, that part will become less and less relevant.

[3saster]

If you say 75%, what map is this about? If you run something at very high frame rates you start measuring things that are mostly irrelevant once performance becomes an issue.

Just the start of E1M1, standing in place at the spawn point. I haven't ran a proper benchmark as such. From the current texture_rework branch under the aforementioned conditions, ~330fps for OGL, ~230fps for Vulkan.

Right on about the irrelevancy, I play with vsync on at 60Hz so could not care less

Yeah, any of the stock maps are poor choices for the rendered, they run so high it doesn't matter or really test it well (if they dont, you have bigger problems). For actual testing (with and without nomonsters), Sunder MAP09 and MAP15 are great test cases (Sunder in general is almost designed to be a benchmarking tool), as is that bridge in Frozen Time.

From my experience on Nvidia hardware, Vulkan really shines when you start turning on certain effects. 32x multi sampling, for example, has a high framerate hit on OpenGL, but a negligable performance hit on Vulkan. On default settings, they are about equal for me, but once you start turning on various post processing effects and whatnot, Vulkan is way ahead for me when it matters.

[Graf Zahl]

Yeah, any of the stock maps are poor choices for the rendered, they run so high it doesn't matter or really test it well (if they dont, you have bigger problems). For actual testing (with and without nomonsters), Sunder MAP09 and MAP15 are great test cases (Sunder in general is almost designed to be a benchmarking tool), as is that bridge in Frozen Time.

Other good maps are the view from the church steeple in Hellcore's MAP09 (you got to noclip there), the opening cave in P:AR's E1M6 and the crane in P:AR E1M3, especially when benchmarking less performant hardware.

From my experience on Nvidia hardware, Vulkan really shines when you start turning on certain effects. 32x multi sampling, for example, has a high framerate hit on OpenGL, but a negligable performance hit on Vulkan. On default settings, they are about equal for me, but once you start turning on various post processing effects and whatnot, Vulkan is way ahead for me when it matters.

Interesting. I normally run the game a6 8x MSAA, I never tried higher settings - but I think one problem that comes to the surface here is that in order to support original GL3 hardware the renderer cannot use the most efficient methods to set up its postprocessing chain - haven't we heard this story of old hardware getting in the way of performance a few times before...?

[Darkcrafter]

I always support and appreciate what Graf is doing as well as drfrag. But I honestly think Graf greatly underestimated the amount of people that have older hardware. How this happened you could ask - they simply didn't participate in poll e.g. didn't install GZDoom with polling code. I feel like there is a solid 20% of them.

What they don't like? I think this:

- new video mode menu;
- ditched gl 2 support due to having old cards and intel hd plague;

What they like about LZDoom - the way drfrag tries to optimize it like including those distance culling options, I honestly think that should go over GZDoom too, as well as idea I'm trying to propose in this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-TVan7IJAo

By the way, I should have been reported this probably but while Vulkan indeed runs 3-5 FPS more than OpenGL it has some visual glitches in my dynamic skyboxes, so I still play with OpenGL.