 Every once in a while in my life, I encounter a computer or electronics issue that's completely inexplicable. For example, in the early 2000s, I had a machine that for some reason didn't require the Warcraft 3 disk to be loaded in the optical drive. I wasn't using an OCD crack, and the issue, I'm not gonna call it a problem because it was very convenient, the issue persisted over multiple reformats and reinstallations of the game, only to go away when I upgraded the computer. But the point of this video is not for me to tell old stories from a million years ago because I'm old. The point of this video is that thanks to the power of video recording and the internet, I can now share with you these experiences. Welcome to episode 1 of what we're calling Haunted Hardware! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! TunnelBear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open internet. To try TunnelBear for free, check out the link in the video description. So you're sitting there at home thinking, Linus, there's nothing haunted about running Doom on a computer, it's supposed to work that way, the game is scary. Or not scary, whatever the case may be. No, no. The haunted thing about what you're looking at right now is this FRAPS counter up here in the top left corner. That's not supposed to be there. Now if I was running an OpenGL mode, that would be fine. But look at this, settings, advanced, Vulkan. For contrast, this is how it is supposed to work. This is my normal desktop test bench with a GTX 1080. We go into settings, advanced, OpenGL 4.5. Boom, FPS counter is working. Now if we switch to Vulkan, Doom will restart. And we'll fast forward through this if it drags out for too long for you guys and my camera person will hold kind of still. But really you can already see, okay, we are switched over to Vulkan, my FPS counter is gone. FRAPS is still very much loaded in the system tray, it just doesn't work that way. FRAPS isn't designed to work with either of the new lower level APIs, that is Vulkan or DirectX 12. That what you just saw there is the normal expected behavior. So it's at this stage in any troubleshooting process that the good old sanity check comes in. So you go into your settings, you go, this is a really cool feature of Doom. It's like it's almost like it's made by people who care. You go show performance metrics and you go, okay, is it actually running Vulkan? Yes, it would appear so. Okay, but if we were running in borderless window mode, it is possible that FRAPS could overlay itself in some way. So what we need to do is go into the console. And this is another great thing that Doom has and good games should all have. And we can have a look at what commands we have and we go, okay, vid restart. Okay, you saw that black flash? No, the game is running 1920 by 1080 full screen. So the next logical step, let's check our software revisions. Maybe Nvidia has a driver or Doom released an update or the FRAPS has a new version, something of which enables this functionality. So Nvidia driver 21, 21, 13, 72, 70. Got it. Doom build 127, 29, 92 and FRAPS is version 3.5.99. Let's go double check all that stuff over on the desktop here. We've got that same driver revision. It's great. Even though we're running a different graphics card, there's the same architecture running the same driver. Doom is running that exact same build, which makes sense because I've always got auto update enabled in Steam. And finally, FRAPS is running that same 3.5.99. In fact, here's a fun fact. I didn't realize this until I was working on this video. FRAPS hasn't even been updated since 26 of February 2013. And so for them to have introduced a patch that enables this functionality seems very, very unlikely, considering the last patch fixed Aero desktop and DirectX 10 games. So then it's at this point that we start getting into the troubleshooting steps that take a little bit longer. We're going to do a full reinstall of our driver as well as Doom, downloading a completely fresh copy of the game off of Steam, just in case there is some weird corruption that's not allowing it to properly launch in Vulcan mode, for example. To get rid of our video card driver, we're going to be using DDU. I'm not going to go through all the steps in, you know, exquisite detail, but basically you reboot in safe mood, you run DDU, you download a fresh copy of the drivers off Nvidia and install that and try again. And we're back in game now with fresh drivers, fresh copy of the game, and exactly the same behavior we saw last time. So at this point, it's time to take it to the next level. We are going to do a fresh format of this PC. We're going to go back to bone stock, then we're going to update the drivers, then we're going to install the game and see if it persists. Now, I suspect it's running in OpenGL mode out of the box. It's not something you can configure when you launch the game for Doom. So everything here looks hunky-dory, totally normal. OpenGL 4.5. We have fraps. Okay. Advanced Vulcan. Yes. 1100 frames per second. Haunted, right? Haunted. Haunted computer. Vulcan 1.0.13. Frame rate counter working, even though it shouldn't. And the game is loading. Now, I did observe that OpenGL Vulcan, regardless of what API it was running, performance did look a little bit low there. So I'm going to remove another variable. I'm going to disable the onboard graphics here. Disabling this will cause it to stop functioning, you think? That's good. I would sure hope so. And what I'm going to do now is to determine once and for all whether we have magic fraps or broken game. I am actually going to do our benchmark run with each different readout here and see if they perform differently. Okay. So settings. We're going to triple confirm them. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, full screen, blah, blah, blah. Advanced Vulcan. Definitely everything is. Wow. Wow, Windows. Okay. I'm not going to run the whole benchmark because, quite frankly, the difference between Vulcan and OpenGL at this resolution on this hardware should be pretty much immediately noticeable. So we're getting about 70 frames per second talking to this guy respectfully. So that's fine. Let's go ahead. Settings, advanced, OpenGL, restart. Okay, here we go. No way. Okay, hold on just a second here. What the **** just happened? Okay. So at this point in the video, I was kind of expecting the conclusion to be, haha, it's just running OpenGL because the game isn't launching in Vulcan mode. But what we appear to have gotten instead, and I don't have another 1060 equipped laptop to compare against, unfortunately, but what we appear to have gotten instead is magical FRAPS running on a magical machine, magically working on Vulcan, even though there is absolutely no way, and I'm sure the FRAPS developers would be happy to call me up and tell me this personally, there's absolutely no way that this is working. So this is the kind of **** that I go through. All I wanted, all I wanted was a performance comparison between this laptop and this laptop. For my review of this laptop. This is what I'm dealing with. So if you were wondering when you saw the review of this laptop, which will perhaps come out before this video, why there was no Vulcan Doom testing, now you know. And I'm not blaming this laptop. In fact, I probably won't even mention it because it's probably not this laptop's fault because I've seen this kind of **** before. I'm just happy that for once I got to share the experience with you guys. You know, I'm really glad that FreshBooks is the ad spot on this video because have you guys ever been dealing with some kind of accounting thing, like a checkbook that won't balance or like an interest accrual of like 32 cents that you just can't get to reconcile and just go, no, that's it, it's all haunted, I give up. Well, if you have, FreshBooks could be the solution for you. FreshBooks is a super simple cloud accounting software that's helping over 5 million small service-based businesses conquer their admin and paperwork with a lot less time and stress. It takes about 30 seconds to create and send a polished professional looking invoice. You can get paid through FreshBooks on your own schedule, whether that means taking a deposit or getting paid all at the end, and you can even track your expenses. It is pretty freaking awesome. So with FreshBooks, whether you're a plumber, a computer technician, you run a small dance studio, whatever the case may be, you can save time and spend your time running your business instead of doing boring paperwork for your business. And if you have any questions, if any of this is like overwhelming and you're like, I don't know how it works, FreshBooks has a war-winning customer service that you can talk to any time you want. So for an unrestricted 30-day free trial, just head over to FreshBooks.com slash tech tips linked in the video description and enter Linus Tech Tips in the How You Heard About Us section. So thanks for watching this episode of what are we calling this? Haunted hardware. Whoo. If you guys dislike this video, hit that dislike button. But if you liked it, hit that like button, get subscribed for maybe more haunted hardware, depending on how many people hit that like button and maybe consider checking out where to buy this laptop or any other the gear that we put in the video. You can find the link to the video description over on Amazon using our affiliate code. Also linked in the video description is our merch store where you can buy cool t-shirts like this one, as well as our community forum, which you can join to discuss hardware and hardware related accessories, which is a very, very belabored King of the Hill reference. Probably no one, no one caught that hardware. Yeah, I sell hardware and hardware. Anyway, sorry. Don't forget to subscribe. Thanks for watching.