Vulkan vs. OpenGL Performance For Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

When testing the graphics cards at 4K, the DXVK-Native based Vulkan API usage was excellent... Performance gains across the board using Vulkan rather than the OpenGL renderer that's long been used on Linux. For both NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards the results were great with very nice uplift enjoyed by switching over to Vulkan! In the few AMD cases with OpenGL data points missing, that was due to the problem mentioned of excruciatingly slow load times with RadeonSI either due to a new Mesa or CS:GO regression. In any case as shown by the tests at 4K the Vulkan renderer for CS:GO is working out very well.

But at 1080p and 1440p where Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is more CPU bottlenecked, the results were more mixed. The higher-end graphics cards were seeing gains still with Vulkan -- particularly the Radeon graphics cards with RADV were showing some performance advantages. But the lower-end graphics cards were seeing to see sizable regressions over OpenGL (edit: or some sort of resolution related issue with DXVK-Native being looked at now).

In any case at these lower resolutions even with OpenGL CS:GO can easily run at 200~300+ FPS. The data at 4K was most promising and especially for lower-end graphics cards can mean bumping it above 144 FPS threshold in more cases. The great 4K showing also reaffirms the potential for DXVK-Native in performance benefits for older games adapting to using Vulkan with this translation approach.

As the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Vulkan support matures with DXVK-Native, I'll be back around with more benchmarks.