As for image quality, the rendering path that Croteam has implemented appears to be every bit as good as their existing paths. Both AMD and NVIDIA cards exhibited great image quality that was comparable to the baseline DX11 rendering path. And admittedly we weren’t expecting any differently, but it means there are no image quality affecting bugs that we’ve picked up on in our testing.
That said, these Vulkan drivers are classified as betas by both AMD and NVIDIA, and this is not a misnomer. We encountered issues with drivers for both parties, particularly in NVIDIA’s case where we couldn’t successfully run a Talos benchmarking session twice without rebooting, otherwise the game would crash. So coupled with the known limitations for these drivers, it goes without saying that these drivers are really only for testing and development purposes, and that AMD and NVIDIA will need to knock out some more bugs before integrating Vulkan support into their release drivers.
Overall with this being the third low-level API release in the past two years (and a rebirth of sorts for Mantle), for our regular readers there aren’t any great surprises to be found with Vulkan as implemented on The Talos Principle. Still, the results do show promise. Khronos has set about creating a new cross-platform low-level API, and this early preview of Vulkan shows that they have achieved their basic goals. Now it will be a matter of seeing what developers can do with the API with more developer time and in conjunction with further driver improvements from AMD, NVIDIA, and the other GPU vendors.
