Vulkan is the latest toy in the gaming industry that all the cool kids are playing with, and Ubisoft wants in on some of that action. A few months ago, Ubisoft ported Rainbow Six Siege to the Vulkan API and the result was amazing. While not all players benefit from Vulkan support, there were many who reported over 10-20 FPS gain compared to DirectX11. That’s a big improvement and can make a game run over 60 FPS that was previously stuck at 50 FPS. Performance improvements were seen mostly in lower to mid-end systems. Due to this, many Siege players are now opting for Vulkan.
Due to the success in Siege, Ubisoft is now porting their other titles to Vulkan as well. Recently, developers announced that Ghost Recon Breakpoint will be getting Vulkan API support in its upcoming Title Update 2.0.0. The update will launch tomorrow and players will be able to choose between the two APIs from the Breakpoint launcher.
In the performance department, Vulkan is no doubt a better choice compared to Dx11 or 12. However, Vulkan is not without its cons. The API requires more complex coding from the developer. “APIs such as Vulkan offer more flexibility and the ability to work more closely with the hardware's capabilities, therefore requiring less CPU usage.” an official blog post said. “This additional flexibility is allowed at the expense of additional coding complexity needed by the programmer.”
Consoles already use this feature, which might be the reason why hardware that was released seven years ago can run games released today. With Vulkan, games have additional advantages like Dynamic Buffer Cache, Improved Texture Streaming, and Asynchronous Compute. You can learn more about Vulkan and the improvements it makes when running games on the official Ubisoft website.
Just because a game is using Vulkan API it doesn’t mean that it will perform better. It also depends on the actual implementation. The best example of good implementation is 2016’s Doom that gave a massive boost of up to 20-30 FPS as compared to OpenGL. Whereas Vulkan in Red Dead Redemption 2 didn’t give any noticeable FPS boosts. Given how good the API was implemented in Rainbow Six Siege, we are confident that implementation in Breakpoint will also be great.
