Do NOT use Vulkan with the new Intel drivers

[DaRkL3AD3R]

Intel recently added official support for Vulkan to their Windows main driver line. I immediately wanted to test it in Dolphin, to compare performance to DX12, and loaded it up after doing a clean install of the driver post DDU removal of the old one.

Well, this did not go well at all. Thankfully I already had MSI Afterburner up and showing the log graphs with my selected monitored statistics, namely Pagefile and System RAM utilization.

Less than a second after launching my test game (Metroid Prime), RAM utilization spiked to 100% of my available memory, 16GB, and the Pagefile also shot up to 24GB (!) and at this point, I thought my computer froze. There was no further screen updates, and my mouse wasn't working. But my poor, poor HDD was chattering away like crazy, showing that the system was still in operation and performing tasks. I believe it was really trying to write 24GB to the HDD's pagefile, and the complete system freeze was because of the total flood of RAM usage crippling iGPU to 0 frames per second. After 20 seconds I did get a desktop frame update, yep 1 frame per 20 seconds, and the mouse moved location and all other dynamic elements updated in that one frame.

If you have a Skylake or Kaby Lake system and are running the integrated GPU, do NOT try using Vulkan on this new driver. I mean, if you're feeling dangerous and want to try it for science, go ahead. But be ready for a total system halt with your drive being thrashed heavily.

[Techie Android]

(02-25-2017, 12:50 PM)DaRkL3AD3R Wrote: Intel recently added official support for Vulkan to their Windows main driver line. I immediately wanted to test it in Dolphin, to compare performance to DX12, and loaded it up after doing a clean install of the driver post DDU removal of the old one.

Well, this did not go well at all. Thankfully I already had MSI Afterburner up and showing the log graphs with my selected monitored statistics, namely Pagefile and System RAM utilization.

Less than a second after launching my test game (Metroid Prime), RAM utilization spiked to 100% of my available memory, 16GB, and the Pagefile also shot up to 24GB (!) and at this point, I thought my computer froze. There was no further screen updates, and my mouse wasn't working. But my poor, poor HDD was chattering away like crazy, showing that the system was still in operation and performing tasks. I believe it was really trying to write 24GB to the HDD's pagefile, and the complete system freeze was because of the total flood of RAM usage crippling iGPU to 0 frames per second. After 20 seconds I did get a desktop frame update, yep 1 frame per 20 seconds, and the mouse moved location and all other dynamic elements updated in that one frame.

If you have a Skylake or Kaby Lake system and are running the integrated GPU, do NOT try using Vulkan on this new driver. I mean, if you're feeling dangerous and want to try it for science, go ahead. But be ready for a total system halt with your drive being thrashed heavily.

Vulkan was design by Nvidia for Nvidia GPUs so it doesn't surprise me that that failed. If you have a Nvidia GPU you should set it to use that and then set it to use Vulkan. I know it's fine because while on Windows 10 my system performed marginally better on Vulkan.

[Helios]

You... Couldn't be more wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan_(API)

If anybody had a hand in "Designing Vulkan", it's AMD, as it was built upon AMD's work on their Mantle API that didn't go anywhere. And uh, have you seen Vulkan benchmarks on AMD? They're very freaking good considering the cards they're being benched on.

Users say the darndest things.

Anyways, Vulkan is fine to use on nvidia simply because we could always use more bug reports, but the "ideal" backend for nvidia is OpenGL. Our GL backend is nearly as fast as Vulkan is on nvidia and much more stable.

[Techie Android]

(02-28-2017, 12:04 PM)Helios Wrote: You... Couldn't be more wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan_(API)

If anybody had a hand in "Designing Vulkan", it's AMD, as it was built upon AMD's work on their Mantle API that didn't go anywhere. And uh, have you seen Vulkan benchmarks on AMD? They're very freaking good considering the cards they're being benched on.

Users say the darndest things.

Anyways, Vulkan is fine to use on nvidia simply because we could always use more bug reports, but the "ideal" backend for nvidia is OpenGL. Our GL backend is nearly as fast as Vulkan is on nvidia and much more stable.

OKAY... Have you seen my question? Since you seem knowledgeable about Vulkan maybe you know why it's not working in Kubuntu. It just says "failed to load Vulkan libraries" when I try to change my backend. I know I have the libraries for it because I installed them directly from the repositories using my terminal.

[DaRkL3AD3R]

This topic has nothing to do with Nvidia, who created Mantle, etc.

It's about people using Intel GPUs and running the latest Windows driver which has finally added support for Vulkan. I was hoping at least one other person out there by now, at least a developer, would have tried it to confirm these results so we can get to the bottom of what's going on. I wouldn't recommend general users try it because it did halt my system and thrash my HDD, but an advanced user like a dev could easily deal with such a situation and hopefully gain some information about what's going on that would such an erratic behavior.