MajinCry

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Jul 28, 2015
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Holy hell you guys. If we're lucky, Skyrim SE and Fallout 4 will get a Vulkan renderer. And if we're suuuuper lucky? Bethesda will backport Vulkan to New Vegas and fam. That'd be the day, eh?

https://twitter.com/bethesda/status/836688120846381059
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http://www.pcworld.com/article/3174...-vulkan-cozies-up-to-a-geforce-now-rival.html
Most notable is a new technology deal with Bethesda, the publisher of Doom, Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Dishonored, and more. While partnerships between graphics companies and developers have typically involved just a single, specific games, AMD’s deal with Bethesda spans multiple games across a range of series.

The crux is primarily to implement Vulkan, the open DirectX 12 alternative that rose from the ashes of AMD’s Mantle technology, as well as “the computing and graphics power of AMD Ryzen CPUs [and] Radeon GPUs.”

Keep in mind that Bethesda also said that they'd be adding a D3D12 renderer to ESO. They never touched on it again, but maybe, juuuuust maybe, we'll see D3D12's more tolerant brother be given the reigns.

https://www.ticgn.com/elder-scrolls-online-directx-12-patch-in-the-works/

@Hyade – Is a DX12 upgrade a possibility in the future? ESO runs pretty darn well, except when there are many things requiring animation on screen at once. My slight understanding of this is that there are too many “draw calls” going out in such situations, and that DX12 handles them drastically better. Right now I run my game on lower settings specifically because of the lower framerate I get in cities, and it sounds like DX12 could improve the situation.

Yes, we are planning on a DX12 upgrade and expect that this will give us a number of graphics performance improvements. We cannot provide an ETA at this time, but it is something we’re working towards.
 

ThatBuzzkiller

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AMD should focus their energy on upcoming releases instead of opening up the wounds with old games when these older revisions of the game engines just aren't very compatible with DX12 in terms of performance gains ...

In due time AMD's mistakes will be forgiven as more games come out just like how people are now forgiving AMD's blunder on Bulldozer with Ryzen ...

Credit to them for getting the entirety of Zenimax Media on board since I though they would've been the few very late publishers to do a transition ...
 

MajinCry

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Jul 28, 2015
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AMD should focus their energy on upcoming releases instead of opening up the wounds with old games when these older revisions of the game engines just aren't very compatible with DX12 in terms of performance gains ...

In due time AMD's mistakes will be forgiven as more games come out just like how people are now forgiving AMD's blunder on Bulldozer with Ryzen ...

Credit to them for getting the entirety of Zenimax Media on board since I though they would've been the few very late publishers to do a transition ...

If they are backporting Vulkan, Bethesda's games are exactly the ones that should get it. Have you tried bumping up the shadow distance in Fallout 4, and seeing how many draw calls are being made? Put them at 20000 and look at Lexington. Report back how many draw calls you get :D

Hell, if you go to Riverwood, stop at the entrance to the blacksmith and turn around, the game will make over 3k draw calls on Direct3D 9. That's beyond bad.

Or in Fallout 3, go to downtown DC. Notice how it's split up into separate parts? Draw calls are the reason for that. If you just go to where the Talon Company mercenaries fight the Super Mutants, a ways away from Super Duper Mart, you'll make >3k draw calls easy. I remember getting 6.5k at one point, and boy was that slow.

In New Vegas, the world was initially going to be designed seamless. Freeside & The Strip were going to be placed directly in the worldspace, but had to be segmented later in development due to the sheer number of draw calls being issued. Even just combining Freeside and The Strip into one cell throttles the framerate.

In Oblivion, the Imperial Market District @ Noon whilst raining, will bring even an i5 2500k to it's knees, when you have shadows and reflections enabled. Forward rendering redraws the whole scene as many times as there are lights. And when you have reflections enabled, the final scene is drawn again.

These games are prime examples of draw calls being the main limiter on performance. And don't forget how massive the community is for them. Just take a look at the modding community on NexusMods.

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Myself? I sure bloody hope we get Vulkan backported. Not counting on it, but man...Tale Of Two Wastelands with open cities? Sign me up doc.
 

ThatBuzzkiller

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It's a pretty big stretch to claim that driver overhead is the cause of all the performance problems or design decisions in the Bethesda games you mentioned ...

Really hard to isolate the issues in each of these cases. Shadow rendering depends more than just the GPU submission overhead, it also depends on the GPU's effective triangle rate and the rasterizer. Why they segment these areas could be for other reasons as well such consoles (didn't have a lot of memory), reduce streaming traffic (PCIE was fairly bandwidth limited at the time), or they have lot's of object oriented code that could really kill CPU performance ...
 

Mopetar

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Hopefully this means that Bethesda's next games have a new and overhauled engine. FO4 wasn't exactly bad looking, but you could tell how dated it was and it didn't run all that well for how it looked.

Fallout and Elder Scrolls are some of the biggest franchises around right now, especially after Skyrim's popularity. Given that both of the major consoles are going with AMD yet again for their refreshes/updates/whatever, it makes a certain amount of sense for Bethesda to work with AMD to get the most out of that hardware.
 

tamz_msc

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All of Bethesda Game Studios' problems with performance and visual fidelity would disappear is they just ditch their Gamebryo-based Creation Engine for good.
 

tential

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I would be brought to literal tears if this supported Vulkan, crossfire, and mods. I'm not kidding literal tears of joy.

4k gaming for the whole series with maxed out graphic omg... Please give it to me Bethesda
 
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Headfoot

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can you imagine an ES5 that's nearly as performant (with allowances made due to the closed room vs open world difference) as Doom Vulkan? Talk about the biggest performance ranking change. From near the bottom to near the top. I really hope that this "Vulkan for Bethesda" doesn't mean "Vulkan for Bethesda* (the publisher but not the game studio)"
 

tential

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can you imagine an ES5 that's nearly as performant (with allowances made due to the closed room vs open world difference) as Doom Vulkan? Talk about the biggest performance ranking change. From near the bottom to near the top. I really hope that this "Vulkan for Bethesda" doesn't mean "Vulkan for Bethesda* (the publisher but not the game studio)"

Ya, I'm just imagining this series running at Doom levels of performance.
Lawd....
Doom Vulkan should have changed every developers minds INSTANTLY.

The downsides of doing that... I don't know what they are? I'll buy a slower GPU for 1080p gaming? (Not likely!!!)
 

MajinCry

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Jul 28, 2015
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Ya, I'm just imagining this series running at Doom levels of performance.
Lawd....
Doom Vulkan should have changed every developers minds INSTANTLY.

The downsides of doing that... I don't know what they are? I'll buy a slower GPU for 1080p gaming? (Not likely!!!)

I wonder if we'd see any ENB Series mods for the Vulkan versions.

But eh, not having ENB in exchange for proper draw distances? I'll cope.
 

EXCellR8

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At least they're doing the right thing with Prey... cryengine is a wonderful thing
 

ThatBuzzkiller

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If AMD is in a partnership with besthesda then they should push for as many of their own vender extensions in games as possible and purposefully write slow paths for their competitors if they were smart enough ...
 

w3rd

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AMD should worry about the future, not people looking to play older (nostalgic) games. Can't live your life in the past, it is 2017 now, and 2018 games are only 9 months away...
 

Yakk

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May 28, 2016
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This sounds awesome, and AMD has actually done this before...

It reminds me... Of when AMD did this with Square Enix when they created a plugin Mantel Module for the old Unreal Engine 3 for Thief. The game may not be everyone's cup of tea, but technically the Crossfire Mantle version was excellent with massive CPU multi-threading and incredibly smooth, and eerily responsive, gameplay.

I'm thinking AMD must be working on a similar plugin for Bethesda's old engine. Either just for the CPU threading (probably), but it would be nice to have Vulcan and/or DX12 api too.
 

Bacon1

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AMD should worry about the future, not people looking to play older (nostalgic) games. Can't live your life in the past, it is 2017 now, and 2018 games are only 9 months away...

Well them updating their engine would make new games run better as well ;)
 

Malogeek

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I can't see them doing anything with their current released games but solely working on their games in development and future ones. Doesn't make much sense to go back and spend a LOT of resources remaking their aged engines for Vulkan.

This should be taken as it is, huge news for all gamers no matter what their hardware for future titles from their studios. And a bonus for AMD owners with current hardware.
 

MajinCry

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I can't see them doing anything with their current released games but solely working on their games in development and future ones. Doesn't make much sense to go back and spend a LOT of resources remaking their aged engines for Vulkan.

This should be taken as it is, huge news for all gamers no matter what their hardware for future titles from their studios. And a bonus for AMD owners with current hardware.

Aye, it's probably wishful thinking entirely, but god damn it would be sooooo good.
 
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SPBHM

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not surprising give Doom Vulkan

I think Fallout 4 Vulkan would be an interesting exercise, but probably doesn't make much sense at this point... I think this is more for future games
 

tential

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not surprising give Doom Vulkan

I think Fallout 4 Vulkan would be an interesting exercise, but probably doesn't make much sense at this point... I think this is more for future games
Under what grounds does Fallout 4 not make sense....
 

MajinCry

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Under what grounds does Fallout 4 not make sense....

Money wise. I could see it happening with Skyrim Legendary Edition, since it's a recent release that is not really populated in contrast to the original. It has somewhat better performance due to D3D 11, but none of the cool mods that require the script extender.

But having vastly better performance, with an extremely high object density cap, would sway many more I'd wager. We'd be able to mod the game's world that much more.
 

MajinCry

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Does fallout support 21:9 yet? Or do we have to mod?

Have ta mod it. Fallout 4 doesn't support 5:4 or 4:3 either, unlike Skyrim and friends.

Luckily, it's an easy fix. Just got to edit a few numbers in the .swf files, and edit the vertices in the interface's quad mesh.
 

Valantar

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AMD should worry about the future, not people looking to play older (nostalgic) games. Can't live your life in the past, it is 2017 now, and 2018 games are only 9 months away...
Bethesda is a very prolific game developer and publisher. While this might be for backporting to already released games, what is damn sure is that it'll come into play for upcoming releases.
I can't see them doing anything with their current released games but solely working on their games in development and future ones. Doesn't make much sense to go back and spend a LOT of resources remaking their aged engines for Vulkan.

This should be taken as it is, huge news for all gamers no matter what their hardware for future titles from their studios. And a bonus for AMD owners with current hardware.
Considering that Skyrim is still among the 10 most played games on steam at any given time, I don't think they'd hesitate to upgrade it. After all, it still sells like hotcakes.