Novum has released a brand new version of the Quake 1 port that replaces OpenGL with Vulkan, vkQuake. In case you weren’t aware of, vkQuake is a Quake 1 port using Vulkan instead of OpenGL for rendering, it is based on the popular QuakeSpasm port and runs all mods compatible with it like Arcane Dimensions or In The Shadows.

According to its description, and compared to QuakeSpasm, vkQuake also features a software Quake like underwater effect, has better color precision, generates mipmap for water surfaces at runtime and has native support for anti-aliasing and AF.

vkQuake also serves as a Vulkan demo application that shows basic usage of the API. For example it demonstrates render passes & sub passes, pipeline barriers & synchronization, compute shaders, push & specialization constants, CPU/GPU parallelism and memory pooling.

Version 1.0 comes with numerous performance optimizations, updated compute shader water texture, and an update to the latest QuakeSpasm code.

Those interested can download vkQuake 1.0 from here!

Here is also a very old video, showing the performance difference between QuakeSpasm (OpenGL) and vkQuake (Vulkan).

John Papadopoulos

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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