AMD And Bethesda Team Up For Vulkan Implementation Across Multiple Video Games

As the race between NVidia and AMD heat up to determine who the king of graphics cards is, a new development emerged that could change the game. It would seem that famed video game development company Bethesda has made a partnership with AMD. The goal is to implement the Vulkan system into the developer’s multiple video game titles.

For those who don’t know, Vulkan is an open source alternative to DirectX 12 and is based on the Mantle tech that was developed by AMD, PC World reports. It’s meant to boost gaming performance, most notably improving frame rate in graphically intensive titles.

AMD’s partnership with Bethesda is notable largely because of how notorious the developer is for creating incredibly buggy games. By injecting Vulkan into GPUs that specifically support the company’s titles, games like “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” and “Fallout 4” will likely get a graphics boost, at the least.

The power of Vulkan was already showcased by Bethesda when id Software’s critically-acclaimed video game “Doom” incorporated the option into its system, which substantially improved frame rates. By all accounts, the difference with the before and after comparison is nothing short of staggering. As such, it would likely be to Bethesda’s benefit to bring such graphical power to all of its major titles.

It would seem that Radeon head Raja Koduri is taking this partnership seriously as well, PC Gamer reports. Games by Bethesda will be optimized with the graphics cards Ryzen and Vega.

"This is a true engineering collaboration between the companies, not just kind of marketing or branding stuff," Koduri explained. "We have dedicated engineers on both sides working on optimizations and leveraging multiple cores, and all the new features in the Radeon GPUs."

It’s worth mentioning that video game publishers and graphics card companies have collaborated in the past. However, this is the first time that such an arrangement spanned multiple titles.