Two Vulkan Issues in A27 (and unrelated choppiness caused by control groups)

[little Guest]

It seems that no one has mentioned these two Vulkan issues yet.

1. With Vulkan in fullscreen, after pressing Alt + Tab, the screen remains stuck on the 0ad display.
   No issue with OpenGL, nor with Vulkan in windowed mode.
   This occurs on a VGA (D-sub) monitor, but there is no issue when using HDMI to a USB video capture card connected to an old laptop.
    
2. With Vulkan and GPU skinning enabled, the screen jumps to the desktop and the program shuts down when loading the game.
   No crash report.
    

• Win 10, Vega igpu, driver: Adrenalin 24.9.1 (latest)

 

By the way, is it a known issue that when multiple control groups control a large number of units (e.g., 632), moving the camera—even without selecting units—feels a bit choppy?

 

(issue2)userreport_hwdetect.txt(issue2)system_info.txt(issue2)mainlog.html

Edited March 9 by little Guest
Text and grammar corrections, image from URL instead of attachment.

[vladislavbelov]

Hi! Thank you for the report! (And sorry for the delayed answer)

On 08/03/2025 at 4:18 PM, little Guest said:

With Vulkan in fullscreen, after pressing Alt + Tab, the screen remains stuck on the 0ad display.
No issue with OpenGL, nor with Vulkan in windowed mode.
This occurs on a VGA (D-sub) monitor, but there is no issue when using HDMI to a USB video capture card connected to an old laptop.

Is the game still playable after multiple Alt+Tab? So it just stays on top?

On 08/03/2025 at 4:18 PM, little Guest said:

With Vulkan and GPU skinning enabled, the screen jumps to the desktop and the program shuts down when loading the game.
No crash report.

Does it crash in the game or in the main menu? When GPU skinning is disable everything works fine?

On 08/03/2025 at 4:18 PM, little Guest said:

By the way, is it a known issue that when multiple control groups control a large number of units (e.g., 632), moving the camera—even without selecting units—feels a bit choppy?

If profiler doesn't show performance issues then I'd expect such choppiness.

[little Guest]

I'm glad to see your reply.

On 31/03/2025 at 1:04 AM, vladislavbelov said:

Is the game still playable after multiple Alt+Tab? So it just stays on top?

Yes. After the second Alt + Tab, it's back.

I'm not sure what you mean by "So it just stays on top?"
However, from the previously provided images, we can see that in "after Alt+Tab," the mouse cursor in both Vulkan fullscreen mode and Vulkan windowed mode is in the shape of a capital "I," which should indicate that the switch to the browser was successful.

On 31/03/2025 at 1:04 AM, vladislavbelov said:

Does it crash in the game or in the main menu? When GPU skinning is disable everything works fine?

In the game. It is fine in the main menu.

Yes. It is fine when GPU skinning is disable.

On 31/03/2025 at 1:04 AM, vladislavbelov said:

If profiler doesn't show performance issues then I'd expect such choppiness.

Additional information: Attached are three screenshots showing the cases with control groups, after removing control groups, and selecting 300 units.

It seems that the main difference lies in the gui sim update.

The impact of control groups (control a large number of units) is more severe than selecting 300 units.

Edited April 4 by little Guest
Shorten the quotation.

[little Guest]

On 08/03/2025 at 11:18 PM, little Guest said:

With Vulkan and GPU skinning enabled, the screen jumps to the desktop and the program shuts down when loading the game.
No crash report.

The following link is a video that I tried to record using a video capture card.
https://i.imgur.com/IbzBkIT.mp4

I hope this makes the description of issue 2 clearer.

[vladislavbelov]

On 03/04/2025 at 5:17 PM, little Guest said:

I'm not sure what you mean by "So it just stays on top?"

I meant that it's still working, all animations are playing

On 03/04/2025 at 5:17 PM, little Guest said:

Yes. It is fine when GPU skinning is disable.

Do you have any log after that crash? You can find a path to them here: http://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/wiki/GameDataPaths.

On 03/04/2025 at 5:17 PM, little Guest said:

It seems that the main difference lies in the gui sim update.

Ah, I see. We have some performance issues when many units are selected.

On 08/03/2025 at 4:18 PM, little Guest said:

With Vulkan in fullscreen, after pressing Alt + Tab, the screen remains stuck on the 0ad display.

Could you try to disable borderless fullscreen by adding the following line to your user.cfg?

borderless.fullscreen = "false"

[little Guest]

On 10/04/2025 at 6:57 PM, vladislavbelov said:

I meant that it's still working, all animations are playing

Oh, I see!

For Vulkan fullscreen mode, after the first Alt + Tab, the animations (e.g. side-to-side moving knight and horse in the main menu) stop.
And the mouse behavior suggests that it did switch to the browser successfully.

After the second Alt + Tab, it's back and the position of the knight and horse has changed.
And then, they continue moving left and right.

On 10/04/2025 at 6:57 PM, vladislavbelov said:

Could you try to disable borderless fullscreen by adding the following line to your user.cfg?

borderless.fullscreen = "false"

I tried it, and the result is the same.

On 10/04/2025 at 6:57 PM, vladislavbelov said:

Do you have any log after that crash? You can find a path to them here: http://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/wiki/GameDataPaths.

With Vulkan and GPU skinning disabled, everything works fine.

With Vulkan and GPU skinning enabled, the log [(issue2)......] is actually already attached at the bottom of my first post.

Edited April 11 by little Guest

[vladislavbelov]

On 11/4/2025 at 2:22 PM, little Guest said:

For Vulkan fullscreen mode, after the first Alt + Tab, the animations (e.g. side-to-side moving knight and horse in the main menu) stop.
And the mouse behavior suggests that it did switch to the browser successfully.

After the second Alt + Tab, it's back and the position of the knight and horse has changed.
And then, they continue moving left and right.

That's interesting. I'd say that's a problem on the driver side since it's related only to the VGA case.

Do you have any other game that supports Vulkan? For example, SuperTuxKart.

On 11/4/2025 at 2:22 PM, little Guest said:

With Vulkan and GPU skinning enabled, the log [(issue2)......] is actually already attached at the bottom of my first post.

Nothing suspicious in the logs. Does the GPU skinning work with OpenGL?

[little Guest]

On 18/04/2025 at 5:18 AM, vladislavbelov said:

That's interesting. I'd say that's a problem on the driver side since it's related only to the VGA case.

Do you have any other game that supports Vulkan? For example, SuperTuxKart.

Strangely, I downloaded some games to test, and all of the Alt + Tab worked fine.

The following is the list of games I tested.

• SuperTuxKart (Edit config.xml in configuration folder and change "gl" to "vulkan" for the "render_driver" setting.)
• Dota 2
• Unturned (In Steam, enter "-force-vulkan" in the launch options under Unturned's properties.)
• Veloren
• War Thunder (In Steam, enter "-driver:vulkan" in the launch options under War Thunder's properties.)

On 18/04/2025 at 5:18 AM, vladislavbelov said:

Nothing suspicious in the logs. Does the GPU skinning work with OpenGL?

Yes. With OpenGL + GPU skinning, everything works fine.

ChatGPT suggested that I check the Windows Event Viewer.
After the crash, I found two errors there.
I copied the contents of the two errors into the attached file below.

(issue2)Event viewer.txt