IDK what the devs have planned for future optimizations for this game, but I've been keeping up with the technology news lately and I've seen massive gains in performance on AMD hardware just from games supporting this new API. In a game like DOOM which just released this support we're seeing things like +40% or more performance gains. Planetside 2 is my go-to MMO game, and one of the most hardware demanding titles I play. This game feels so poorly optimized already I would absolutely love this game to start performing well on AMD hardware especially considering the home console this game is ported to uses AMD technology. I currently use an R9 390 and I plan hand-me-downing it and getting a new RX 480. Going to be roughly the same performance as the 390 I wager, but 100 dollars cheaper and more than 100W less TDP. I also plan on upgrading from my i5 3450 which has done a great job the past 5 years to a new Zen CPU or Skylake/Kabylake CPU sometime around the end of this year if everything works out. This game was released in 2012. I can see why AMD would have been struggling back then, but these days I'm blaming poor PS2 developer optimization for 2016-17 flagship products not giving me great results.
In before DUMBING DOWN FOR THE CASUALS comments. Personally as an avid AMD user, I would be very happy if they did this for Planetside, assuming they don't screw it up. Lately my FPS has been pretty sad as of late, despite it being way better a few months ago.
More performance for more players is always good. So let's keep hoping I guess ! @Okjoek You may have that already considered anyways, so it can be easily redundant, but if not make sure to get a RX480 with an aftermarket cooler ( my personal favorite is Sapphire because really cool, silent and powerful ), not the whack stock one. Just saying that because I've seen so many comments in reviews to the RX480 on YT where people said they already ordered a stock one. And I also really hope AMD gets their shart together with the Zen CPUs. More competitive companies are always good, especially for keeping up technological research, actual implementation and realistic prices.
I hope so, Vulkan provides such a big performance boost it's crazy. Especially for AMD cards. If developers started using it instead of dx12, we can FINALLY ditch windows as a gaming platform and switch to Linux! Using Vulkan even knacked old AMD cards from years ago can suddenly play Doom at 60+ fps. The advantage of a low level API...
it would be absolutely amazing if they did add the API, but i wouldn't hold your breath, this is a 4 year old game with a vastly smaller dev team than before and a (somewhat) dwindling playerbase, that being said i'm honestly not too sure how much work (or cost) is involved implementing an API.
I very much doubt they will add Vulkan to the engine for PS2. If forgelight were to ever support that it would be driven by the development of the newer and more high profile games that also run on forgelight. That's not inconceivable though. The problem is that it's not always trivial to just port that functionality back to an older game like PS2 just because it's the same engine. It may require a lot of work, and certainly a lot of testing - so even if forgelight gets upgraded for Vulkan support I kind of doubt it's going to be supported for PS2. Besides, Vulkan primarily allows for more efficient rendering calls if I'm not mistaken - so it's going to offload the GPU primarily, and it is the CPU load that usually leads to poor performance for most people. PS2 can actually run pretty well on a low-end graphics card as long as your CPU is fast - especially if you are willing to turn down the graphics. PS2 actually has very impressive scalability in that regard - but you just don't have a lot of options when it comes to lightening the CPU load. -Stigma
This game engine is based on DX9, which is not easy to upgrade to Vulkan. Also, to properly take advantage of Vulkan, strait replacement isn't enough. Entire engine architecture has to be redesigned to fully take advantage of multithreading Either way, this engine is too old and needs replacements. Upgrading is pointless, need to replace everything. But that's huge work and if it ever comes to pass (after 1-2 million dollar investment) it would be released as PlanetSide 3. No point in doing such major changes and keeping PlanetSide 2, too many things have to change Now, pretty much everything PlanetSide 2 related is legacy code, so only minor improvements are practical. Major stuff is only for new game
Properly written Vulkan engine can have significant CPU performance improvement over DX9 counterpart. That's cause older graphics APIs like DX9 do a lot of CPU side graphical call/state processing due to high abstraction layer between between function calls and hardware implementation. There's a lot more error checking, validation, redundant executions. API like DX9 basically means "the game programmers are stupid, so I'm going to take their code and try interpret it different way so it actually works properly." So even if programmers make some bad calls, everything will still basically work. Vulkan is much more low level, it basically means "I'll assume the game programmer knows what he's doing and if he makes some bad calls it's his problem, I'm not gonna deal with it, good luck figuring out how to work with modern hardware"
They did a good job of it on Doom. So theres no reason other devs can't use it properly. I guess this sorts the good devs from the bad ones
