Direct3D 11 vs. OpenGL vs. Vulkan Radeon Benchmarks On Windows & Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Direct3D 11 vs. OpenGL vs. Vulkan Radeon Benchmarks On Windows & Linux

Being published shortly is a large Windows vs. Linux AMD graphics driver comparison featuring an assortment of OpenGL and Vulkan games. The latest Radeon Software was obviously tested with Windows 10 while under Ubuntu Linux both the AMDGPU-PRO and fully open-source driver stacks were each tested with the cards being used: an R9 Fury and RX 480. For this article as a benefit to Phoronix Premium members is a look at the Direct3D 11 vs. OpenGL vs. Vulkan gaming performance for Dota 2 and The Talos Principle, the only two games with Windows/Linux support where we can test such combinations of renderers...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=D3D11-OGL-Vulkan-Radeon-AUG

[Mystro256]

Neat, Vulkan and openGL seem to be on par. IIRC Croteam did say a few times that the DX11 backend is really optimised, which would explain the performance difference.

Too bad mesa 12.1 is a little slow with Talos.

[edoantonioco]

this looks like another article than I will forget than existed

[kbios]

I think the main conclusion to draw from this comparison is that the specific implementation of a game has way more impact on the performance than the API used. This is a little worrying, because it means the final performance of a game will depend on the quality of the game developers rather than the arguably more experienced and professional driver developers

[sdack]

While I get the frustration with ad blockers would I like to point out that these speed up web browsing by a large factor. Many adverts need to be loaded from secondary web sites, which adds a significant amount of delay to the browsing experience. Just one slow add server and the whole page takes forever to finish loading. Not to mention the delayed rendering can cause annoying shifts in the final layout, and some adds are just being too big and too much.

If you could make it so that your adverts load directly from the Phoronix web server then you would kill two problems in one. If a page then doesn't load or just slowly then so will the ads, but it shouldn't be the ads causing such problems in the first place.

I mean no disrespect when I say this, but I doubt I will ever stop using add and popup blockers, because of the speed boost I get with them. It is not even about a few simple adverts for me any more.

[Ehvis]

@kbioa, that goes for DX11 and OpenGL because they are so different. But when DX12/Vulkan become the common APIs, it shouldn't be so obvious anymore.

[SaucyJack]

I think the main conclusion to draw from this comparison is that the specific implementation of a game has way more impact on the performance than the API used. This is a little worrying, because it means the final performance of a game will depend on the quality of the game developers rather than the arguably more experienced and professional driver developers

Most games claiming 'DX12' or 'Vulkan' are doing little more than writing hasty wrappers around existing OpenGL/DX11 code. An engine needs to be built from the ground up to exploit Vulkan and DX12 properly. You can't just tack some Vulkan code on to an existing game and expect good results. DOOM is probably the only game that did it right. In other words, claiming the API doesn't matter based on results from games that don't really even use it is flawed.

[F i L]

This is great news. Looks like AMDs new drivers are on par with Nvidia's in terms of performance parity between Windows and Linux. Here's to hoping Zen lives up to it's name and more games support Vulkan soon! Linux is approaching a "Point of No Excuses" which is important for consumers. A lot of good things on the way for us.. Wayland & Mir, Flatpak & Snappy, Vulkan, etc.. Basically every gripe I've ever had about Linux over the last 5 years has a sane solution just around the corner. Cool.

[MaxToTheMax]

Looks like we're pretty close to parity between AMDGPU-Pro and Windows proprietary. But I'm more concerned with Mesa vs. Windows proprietary. I'm fed up with proprietary drivers, and it seems like a big selling point of AMD right now is that their Mesa drivers are decent.

With DOTA 2, Mesa is between 75% and 89% as fast as Windows proprietary. But with Talos, it's between 37% and 47%. I think kbios is correct to say that it probably has a lot to do with how well optimized the port of the game is, but you have to factor that in while making hardware purchasing decisions, even if that seems unfair.

I'm still planning my build for early 2017, hopefully by then the Gallium drivers will be better. Fingers crossed!

[davidbepo]

Most games claiming 'DX12' or 'Vulkan' are doing little more than writing hasty wrappers around existing OpenGL/DX11 code. An engine needs to be built from the ground up to exploit Vulkan and DX12 properly. You can't just tack some Vulkan code on to an existing game and expect good results. DOOM is probably the only game that did it right. In other words, claiming the API doesn't matter based on results from games that don't really even use it is flawed.

also hitman