Feral have patched the Vulkan Beta of Mad Max again, another look at performance with benchmarks

I've tried it and it works great. I was only able to play the game in offline mode, but now, it works great even if I'm online. It's nice because that means I can get more scraps and Steam will finally count the number of hours I've spent on this game. Because for the moment, the count is only of 3h, but I know I've spent around 20 or 30 hours. I really like this game.

Thanks Feral for your awesome port.

It's great that we, who had trouble with those drops that are not supposed to be there are now able to play the game without the offline mode with all the achievements and steam overlay.

But what I am really even happier to see is that Feral is putting efforts into improving the overall Vulkan performance and I have no doubt that when Feral gets a good grip on Vulkan, we will have the ports of outstanding performance, perhaps even on par or better than Windows which would actually make the users of other operating systems to keep an eye on linux and its' gaming capabilities.

Great job and keep making penguins happy Feral Interactive!

Tyrant's Lash seems to be a very ideal test for Vulkan as it seems to be completely CPU bound. I was comparing with another person (I believe on the other Mad Max article) who had the same GPU (GTX 960), but I have an i7-6700K CPU and he had an old AMD FX chip. He was getting something very low, like 30 FPS or something like that, and I was getting somewhere around 80 FPS. Again, exact same GPU. Even my laptop with a GTX 860M was beating his framerate due to it having a better CPU even though the GTX 960 is about 3x better than an 860M.

Sry why steamos isn't supported? I can't run serious Sam vulkan too :(

Still didn't find the time to compile mesa-git. Weekend...

The default configuration will not allow you to move the camera with the right pad while any other button is being used, including movement with the stick. This is a big problem for a game like this to not be able to move the camera while doing anything, so I highly recommend changing it to “Mouse Joystick”.

See https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/mad-max-released-for-linux-port-report-and-review-available.8368

This is the main reason why I don't get into this game until now. “Mouse Joystick” isn't nice. As a work around I have additionally configured the the gyro as mouse. But this is also not an optimal solution.

Any ideas?


Last edited by 1xok on 11 Apr 2017 at 7:26 pm UTC

I have spent 20 or 30 hours into the game and I've never noticed this problem. I'll try to see if this "bug" is still there. I usually use RT to accelerate and I can turn the camera at the same time and it's not a problem.

The default configuration will not allow you to move the camera with the right pad while any other button is being used, including movement with the stick. This is a big problem for a game like this to not be able to move the camera while doing anything, so I highly recommend changing it to “Mouse Joystick”.

See https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/mad-max-released-for-linux-port-report-and-review-available.8368

This is the main reason why I don't get into this game until now. “Mouse Joystick” isn't nice. As a work around I have additionally configured the the gyro as mouse. But this is also not an optimal solution.

Any ideas?

I had the same issue. I've fixed it using Steam Controller Configuration available on "Community Configurations" that works well.


Last edited by vickop on 11 Apr 2017 at 7:41 pm UTC

Just to add a precision, I use an xbox360 wired controller and it works perfectly.

Sry why steamos isn't supported? I can't run serious Sam vulkan too :(

For now I can't run *any* vulkan based game on my steam machine. I even upgraded to steamos beta.
Hmmm, wondering if it has anything to do with big picture....

I have a Pascal card, and it still crashes on the 381 drivers. I have gone back to the 378 drivers again.

It's probably something about the version of the drivers or X11 or something like that. I don't see why big picture would be a problem to run vulkan games.

I've never used steam os, but that's my guess.

Just to add a precision, I use an xbox360 wired controller and it works perfectly.

The default configuration will not allow you to move the camera with the right pad while any other button is being used, including movement with the stick. This is a big problem for a game like this to not be able to move the camera while doing anything, so I highly recommend changing it to “Mouse Joystick”.

See https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/mad-max-released-for-linux-port-report-and-review-available.8368

This is the main reason why I don't get into this game until now. “Mouse Joystick” isn't nice. As a work around I have additionally configured the the gyro as mouse. But this is also not an optimal solution.

Any ideas?

I had the same issue. I've fixed it using Steam Controller Configuration available on "Community Configurations" that works well.

Thanks. Will try to find this.

Had a quick test:

Vulkan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyNQRaELdoQ

OpenGL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmlJX1hLo1I

My specs:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/includes/ajax/call_profile.php?user_id=5136

Resolution was 1920x1080
Nvidia driver 378.13

OBS seems to cost me 2-4 frames. Without OBS I was almost always above 60 FPS with Vulkan. My system is decisive benefiting in the Stronghold benchmark, where I have now 60 fps nearly constantly.

The remaining scenes are also okay with OpenGL.

Good work Feral. Keep it up!


Last edited by 1xok on 11 Apr 2017 at 9:57 pm UTC

While the performance is much better with the Vulkan renderer, it's still heavily single core bound. I have around 100-140 FPS in the actual game (Ultra @1080p) but when I'm driving around the FPS drops very often below 60 FPS. When the FPS drops, always one core is at 100% load and GPU load goes down.

I don't expect any magical fix for this, since it's still a port and there will be always down sides. But instead of trying to get the max FPS more upwards, maybe Feral could try to get the load more balanced on threads, if possible. If I could have stable 60 FPS I would be more happy as with 100+FPS and drops below 60 :)

While the performance is much better with the Vulkan renderer, it's still heavily single core bound. I have around 100-140 FPS in the actual game (Ultra @1080p) but when I'm driving around the FPS drops very often below 60 FPS. When the FPS drops, always one core is at 100% load and GPU load goes down.

I don't expect any magical fix for this, since it's still a port and there will be always down sides. But instead of trying to get the max FPS more upwards, maybe Feral could try to get the load more balanced on threads, if possible. If I could have stable 60 FPS I would be more happy as with 100+FPS and drops below 60 :)

Well, it is still beta, so I suspect there's more optimization to come.

Sure and that's why I write this now and not when it's final. For now most reports only state how fast the Vulkan renderer is, but not that there are also still FPS drops. This is even more important than reports of high FPS, IMHO.

BTW, I don't have this drops in the Benchmark, which makes it even more important to report this.


Last edited by Egonaut on 12 Apr 2017 at 3:32 am UTC

Sry why steamos isn't supported? I can't run serious Sam vulkan too :(

Probably the driver is too old? I run SteamOS too and I see no issues, but I install latest drivers myself.

I have a Pascal card, and it still crashes on the 381 drivers. I have gone back to the 378 drivers again.

Do other Vulkan games work for you on 381? I have a 1080 and I can't run SteamVR, Mad Max or Serious Sam Fusion for longer than 5 minutes on the 381 series. It seems to be just broken across all games and not game specific.

I'm really not sure how that got past Nvidia QA...

But instead of trying to get the max FPS more upwards, maybe Feral could try to get the load more balanced on threads, if possible. If I could have stable 60 FPS I would be more happy as with 100+FPS and drops below 60 :)

The entire point is to have a more stable fps not a higher peak number as that by itself isn't that useful :) If you notice the bigger gains on Vulkan compared to GL are all on the minimum and average fps especially in the poorer performing areas, the peak fps in the best performing areas isn't that much slower on GL. This allows for a much better overall experience :)

The game engine is fairly threaded however some things can't be done at the same time and have to be serialised especially if that is how the engine works on all platforms.

Finally your CPU usage checks will be a little SKU'd as we need to spin the main thread when waiting on the GPU to avoid issues where the governor would reduce clock speed causing frame rate pulsing. Serious Sam for example is also effected by the governor being too keen to down-clock your CPU while playing.

Do send in your reproduction steps though as it does sound like you have an issue most people never experience.


Last edited by edddeduck_feral on 12 Apr 2017 at 12:53 pm UTC