id Software Bringing Vulkan Support To Quake Champions With id-Tech 6 And Saber Engine Hybrid

The latest title in id Software's long-running Quake series, Quake Champions, is currently being tested by gamers in a closed beta. There are a lot of graphical goodies available in the game's current state, and players with monitors sporting high refresh rates will be happy to know that framerates aren't capped. The big news, however, is that a future patch will bring Vulkan support to Quake Champions.

This was confirmed by Matt Charles, senior producer at id Software, who spoke with German-language website PCGamesHardware about bringing Vulkan to Quake Champions. The senior producer said id Software was busy working on a Vulkan rendering path for the game, and while the studio did not have it ready in time for the initial closed beta, it expects to release the patch while the game is still being beta tested.


Like Microsoft's competing DirectX 12 API (application programming interface), Vulkan is considered a "low level" API that gives game developers deeper access to resources closer to the GPU. This is important as today's games are more complex than ever, and having lower level access ultimately means more efficient code. What that translates into for gamers is better performance.


Getting back to Quake Champions, the first-person arena shooter is running on a hybrid game engine combining elements of id Software's old id Tech 6 and Saber. As a result, some of the features seen in Doom are not native to Quake Champions, including Vulkan support. Nevertheless, gamers can tweak the games visual quality settings in a number of different ways, as shown above.

Using a Ryzen 7 system with 16GB of RAM and a Radeon RX 480 graphics card, PCGHD noted that the early beta didn't always play smoothly and would need to be restarted on occasion. This is something id Software will undoubtedly address before the game goes live. In addition, early Ryzen adopters should be encouraged by the recent partnership between AMD and Bethesda. This should ensure that games like Quake Champions run well on Ryzen systems.

Quake Champions will release sometime this year as a free-to-play (F2P) title with in-game purchases available.