AMD vs. NVIDIA Vulkan & OpenGL Linux Performance With The New Drivers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD vs. NVIDIA Vulkan & OpenGL Linux Performance With The New Drivers

Thanks to AMD having released their new GPU-PRO "hybrid" Linux driver a few days ago, there is now Vulkan API support for Radeon GPU owners on Linux. This new AMD Linux driver holds much potential and the closed-source bits are now limited to user-space, among other benefits covered in dozens of Phoronix articles over recent months. With having this new driver in hand plus NVIDIA promoting their Vulkan support to the 364 Linux driver series, it's a great time for some benchmarking. Here are OpenGL and Vulkan atop Ubuntu 16.04 Linux for both AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=22957

[chuckula]

I will say congrats to both AMD and Nvidia. AMD deserves congratulations in as much as the R9 Fury can finally at least beat a GTX-970 instead of losing to 3 year old lower-end Kepler parts. Nvidia certainly hasn't been a slouch at adopting Vulkan either.

[davidbepo]

if vulkan does support async shaders then amd will outperform nvidia(in games using it)

[CrystalGamma]

if vulkan does support async shaders the amd will outperform nvidia(in games using it)

GPU Queues are asynchronous in Vulkan, just like DX12.
‘Asynchronous shading’ just refers to a concurrent usage pattern of said queues, so support will be pretty much the same for games supporting both APIs.

As far as these benchmarks go, it seems fairly consistent that right now (maybe upcoming optimizations from AMD will change that) the Fury is pretty equivalent to the 980, the 290 to the 960 and the Tonga to the 950, with memory bound workloads (Xonotic 4K) favoring AMD because of their generally wider buses (especially the Fury's HBM).

[haagch]

This graph says it all: http://openbenchmarking.org/embed.ph...ha=7315b0e&p=2
OpenGL: 75 fps. Vulkan: 111 fps.
50% more performance with a Vulkan renderer that should yield similar performance.
Do we need to say more?

[Veske]

How did you get the Vulkan mode working with the latest driver? For me the game goes black and thinks for like a minute and then changes back to Custom mode.

[darkbasic]

That was an interesting article. Maybe with Vulkan AMD will finally be able to catch up on Nvidia, maybe.

[blackout23]

I hope we have something better to benchmark, soon. Something that was written from the ground up for Vulkan and is more drawcall heavy.

[duby229]

Cool, cool, cool!!

[GreatEmerald]

Pretty interesting. Everyone's been saying that the engines and drivers for Vulkan are still experimental and not performance-optimised, yet it handily beats out OpenGL.

And yes, that's a nice leap for AMD.