Intel OpenGL vs. Vulkan Performance With Mesa 18.0

Given the very strong Vulkan vs. OpenGL performance in the recent low-end/older Linux gaming GPU tests with discrete graphics cards, I was curious to run some benchmarks seeing the current state of Intel's open-source OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance. With the Mesa 18.0 release to be branched soon, it was a good time seeing how the Intel i965 OpenGL and ANV Vulkan drivers compare.

Testing this time around was with the Intel Core i5 8400 "Coffee Lake" system sporting UHD Graphics 630 while using an MSI Z370M MORTAR motherboard, 2 x 4GB DDR4-3200 memory, and a 129GB ADATA SX6000NP NVMe SSD for the OS and a 525GB Crucial CT525MX3 SSD for the Steam Linux game library.

On the software side for this OpenGL vs. Vulkan Linux game testing was a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 18.04 while upgraded to Mesa 17.4-dev (what will be Mesa 18.0) via the Padoka PPA. There was also the upgrade to the latest Linux 4.15 kernel snapshot via the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA. GNOME's X.Org session was used during testing.

A variety of OpenGL and Vulkan Linux gaming tests via Steam were carried out using the Phoronix Test Suite. During testing the Core i5 CPU utilization was also monitored using the system monitor module that is part of the Phoronix Test Suite.