First results from the 4.11.0 survey

[dpJudas]

It doesn't cost 500 euros to get a computer that works well with Vulkan. Ultimately though, it doesn't matter. GZDoom is faced with a problem here. I've already forked it with VKDoom and if GZDoom can't maintain parity with it the users that could afford to upgrade will switch simply because it runs much better.

Why does it run much better? VKDoom uses a much smarter shader/pipeline strategy than the GZDoom vulkan backend version. While it wasn't even a goal of mine lots of people have actually expressed interest in using VKDoom just for that alone. The writing is on the wall here: GZDoom will switch to a Vulkan-only version, the only question now is when. If GZDoom doesn't then it will become the choice of users that will insist it keeps compatibility with old computers, but the moment they upgrade themselves, they switch to VKDoom for the better performance. What a lovely deal that is, isn't it?

[yum13241]

"Someone" isn't a drastic percentage increase.

So while it's true that Mesa has a Vulkan driver for these GPUs, it sounds like it's a case of "something is better than nothing" and you should probably be looking to upgrade to Gen 9 (Skylake) or newer if you want to seriously run Vulkan software even on Linux. That's even ignoring what Graf said about performance.

Yeah, the laptop that thing is in sucks anyway. It does surprisingly well, but still sucks anyway. At least the UEFI implementation isn't awful like the other laptop I have...

[Phredreeke]

I'm gonna quote what I said on discord a while back

it's very easy to look at this in black and white, one end having hardware that struggles to play solitaire and the other end having hardware that'd make ILM jealous, while the reality is that most people are somewhere in the middle

If you have a GPU from the last six years you'll be fine (and that's a conservative estimate, you can go a couple years further back and still have Vulkan support)

[Graf Zahl]

I'm gonna quote what I said on discord a while back

it's very easy to look at this in black and white, one end having hardware that struggles to play solitaire and the other end having hardware that'd make ILM jealous, while the reality is that most people are somewhere in the middle

If you have a GPU from the last six years you'll be fine (and that's a conservative estimate, you can go a couple years further back and still have Vulkan support)

The numbers disagree with you. The middle is a huge empty void. We got a lot at the high end and also a lot at the bottom of the list, but in between there's only a few users. The reality is that there's two vastly distinct user segments - the ones running a gaming-capable system with a powerful graphics card and on the other hands those running cheap (and I mean really cheap!) laptops with no graphics processing power at all.

Also, any discrete graphics card from the last 9 years except the absolute entry level models won't have any problems. Those entry level models are quite rare, btw.

[Graf Zahl]

Why is it so hard to believe that someone doesn't have a 500+ euro computer ? Not everyone has a gaming setup least of all with a game as old as Doom, regardless of how different GZDoom is from stock id Tech 1, most people that aren't within this inner circle of the community are not even actually aware of the differences. Besides, like you said, this is probably the last survey, so is it surprising that a few more people than normal chimed in because they don't want support dropped even more than before ?

dpJudas already said most that had to be said.
In the end it does not matter how many people run older systems, the thing is we are at a point now where we either have to go on or be left behind. You won't find any graphics interested programmer willing to invest time in OpenGL as it is slowly but surely fading away into obscurity - good enough for ports who just want to render the base game with no visual eye candy but if you depend on people willing to pour time into this part of the engine, the current setup is an instant kill switch and you'll end up with an engine that's being left behind and will soon become just as irrelevant as those 10+ year old laptops.

[Cacodemon345]

As long as it can do Vulkan it will still go for a while yet. But having Vulkan and running it well are two different things - old iGPU's might be problematic with the transition.

With a big however - The Vulkan base that GZDoom is set to transition to currently has a shader split similar to the OpenGL ES backend. So - being able to run Vulkan might actually be all you need and it may still run acceptably, at least for a while, yet. However, over the long term you will need support for bindless textures, and not all Vulkan implementations can do that.

How does it detect bindless textures support though? All searching for that term is leading me to VK_EXT_descriptor_indexing, which, uh, is supported on Skylake iGPUs, Kepler GPUs and even Polaris GPUs. So, assuming that I understood correctly that that's the "bindless textures" support part, the shader split shouldn't be really needed since the ones that doesn't support it are too ancient. Unless there are more extensions needed for bindless textures support.

[dpJudas]

That is exactly the extension needed, which is also why we didn't see it as a problem requiring it. Still, it means having Vulkan 1.0 support in itself isn't technically enough.

[Phredreeke]

So all nVidia and Intel GPUs with Vulkan support (not counting the Linux only Ivy Bridge and Haswell drivers) should already support the new Vulkan backend?

Also, any discrete graphics card from the last 9 years except the absolute entry level models won't have any problems. Those entry level models are quite rare, btw.

Yeah, I made a very conservative estimate as to avoid being pointed to a crappy Intel Atom or AMD E-series SoC not supporting Vulkan as a gotcha.

[Rachael]

So all nVidia and Intel GPUs with Vulkan support (not counting the Linux only Ivy Bridge and Haswell drivers) should already support the new Vulkan backend?

No, not quite. Unfortunately it's not that simple.

The best thing to do is to is to get a copy of VkDoom which is available on their Discord server and see if it will run.

[inkoalawetrust]

In the end it does not matter how many people run older systems, the thing is we are at a point now where we either have to go on or be left behind.

Then what is the point of these surveys ? If anyone on a PC from before 2016 is getting shafted, why even bother with surveys ? Not surprised though, it's not like when this subject is brought up the fact that GZDoom has already alienated anyone without a PC from past 2016/2017 is mentioned.

[Graf Zahl]

Because not "everybody on a PC from before 2016" is getting shafted.
For discrete graphics cards, Vulkan had been supported since 2013, and if you got a laptop with a better GPU the same would apply.
Also, as you can see, it's 8.5% of users who would be forced to use the fallback OpenGL build that won't see any new features in the future, and that number will only shrink further.
Why this survey? Simply because I wanted to see that number as it gives a good idea how long it will take until OpenGL becomes irrelevant. My current guess is 4 years.

[inkoalawetrust]

Because not "everybody on a PC from before 2016" is getting shafted.

Yeah I forgot to edit my last post until now because I just remembered this. But you commented out the survey code from returning iGPUs with Intel HD Graphics. Intel UHD systems are still counted though, and Intel made that switch from HD to UHD in 2017. Intel iGPUs are in practically every computer that isn't a gaming setup, and even in a good chunk of setups too in the case of high end Intel CPUs that still have integrated graphics. Most PCs are going to have the Intel HD Graphics that you excluded from the survey, not discrete graphics cards. It's also probably why there is no middle ground between "Crashes on Solitaire" and "Runs 3 separate, simultaneous instances of Stable Diffusion XL" in the survey.

[phantombeta]

Because not "everybody on a PC from before 2016" is getting shafted.

Yeah I forgot to edit my last post until now because I just remembered this. But you commented out the survey code from returning iGPUs with Intel HD Graphics. Intel UHD systems are still counted though, and Intel made that switch from HD to UHD in 2017. Intel iGPUs are in practically every computer that isn't a gaming setup, and even in a good chunk of setups too in the case of high end Intel CPUs that still have integrated graphics. Most PCs are going to have the Intel HD Graphics that you excluded from the survey, not discrete graphics cards. It's also probably why there is no middle ground between "Crashes on Solitaire" and "Runs 3 separate, simultaneous instances of Stable Diffusion XL" in the survey.

This the most disingenuous, misinformed, outright false post I've ever seen. I have no horse in this race, but it's insanely obvious that the only thing "commented out" there is a single if block that adds a bit of extra info about the CPU.
Nothing about that function blocks those GPUs from the survey- nor can it in the first place! But none of that's important for the narrative you're trying to push, now is it?

[inkoalawetrust]

This the most disingenuous, misinformed, outright false post I've ever seen. I have no horse in this race, but it's insanely obvious that the only thing "commented out" there is a single if block that adds a bit of extra info about the CPU.
Nothing about that function blocks those GPUs from the survey- nor can it in the first place! But none of that's important for the narrative you're trying to push, now is it?

How so ? All the strings checked for are the official names of GPU series. And the other two comments in the function pretty clearly state that this is the GPU info, since the CPU info is appended separately into the string it returns. And it also talks about cleaning unnecessary strings from the GPU vendor info. In addition the original post doesn't even mention Intel HD, only UHD, despite Intel HD being the most common graphics type you'll find on any PC, desktop or laptop. And why are you even putting commented out in quotes ? Either way, the line is obviously commented out.

[wildweasel]

From what I'm able to tell (and I am not a programmer by trade), the following block of code:

Code: Select all

		if (device.Compare("AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics") == 0 ||
		device.Compare("Intel(R) UHD Graphics") == 0 ||
		//device.Compare("Intel(R) HD Graphics") == 0 || these are not that interesting so leave them alone
		device.Compare("Intel(R) Iris(R) Plus Graphics") == 0 ||
		device.Compare("Intel(R) Iris(R) Xe Graphics") == 0 ||
		device.Compare("Radeon RX Vega") == 0 ||
		device.Compare("AMD Radeon Series") == 0)
	{
		// for these anonymous series names add the CPU name to get an idea what GPU we really have
		auto ci = DumpCPUInfo(&CPU, true);
		device.AppendFormat(" * %s", ci.GetChars());
	}

is checking the name of the GPU, and if it matches one of the above strings, it takes the extra step to DumpCPUInfo and then format the resulting extra data. That appears to be all that this if block does.