I’m not exactly playing anything new but I’ve been playing Grounded (the first one) on Window for like 2 months. My computer was so hot it was warming up my entire room.
I switched to Linux due to other Microsoft issues and decided to give it another shot. Man, my computer doesn’t really get warm at all. Like yeah I can see the temp monitor change a little bit but not much. There’s no hot air pouring out of my PC. I’m not sweating sitting next to it.
I’ve made no changes to any game settings (other than using proton) or hardware changes. It’s an insane difference.
I love Vulkan so much. Having everything precompiled ahead of time is probably a big contributing factor on why your machine is running cooler. It’s just pulling from the shader cache instead of doing on the fly computation for shaders.
The long and short of it is that Vulkan and other modern graphics APIs are extremely explicit. As the game developer, you tell the GPU exactly what resources are being used, when they’re available, and how work is synchronized. Once you’ve built those command buffers, the driver mostly just submits them to the hardware “fire and forget” style basically.
Older APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D 11 were much higher level. You described what you wanted to draw, and the graphics driver figured out resource transitions, synchronization, and a lot of the scheduling behind the scenes. That made them easier to use but also added CPU overhead and made performance less predictable.
Linux:
I’m not exactly playing anything new but I’ve been playing Grounded (the first one) on Window for like 2 months. My computer was so hot it was warming up my entire room.
I switched to Linux due to other Microsoft issues and decided to give it another shot. Man, my computer doesn’t really get warm at all. Like yeah I can see the temp monitor change a little bit but not much. There’s no hot air pouring out of my PC. I’m not sweating sitting next to it.
I’ve made no changes to any game settings (other than using proton) or hardware changes. It’s an insane difference.
I love Vulkan so much. Having everything precompiled ahead of time is probably a big contributing factor on why your machine is running cooler. It’s just pulling from the shader cache instead of doing on the fly computation for shaders.
That makes sense. I’m still new to all this so I’m kinda learning as I go.
The long and short of it is that Vulkan and other modern graphics APIs are extremely explicit. As the game developer, you tell the GPU exactly what resources are being used, when they’re available, and how work is synchronized. Once you’ve built those command buffers, the driver mostly just submits them to the hardware “fire and forget” style basically.
Older APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D 11 were much higher level. You described what you wanted to draw, and the graphics driver figured out resource transitions, synchronization, and a lot of the scheduling behind the scenes. That made them easier to use but also added CPU overhead and made performance less predictable.