NVIDIA 396.18 Linux Benchmarks, Testing Their New Vulkan SPIR-V Compiler

Here we are looking at the overall CPU usage over the course of all the Vulkan Linux game tests carried out today. As you can see, the CPU memory usage is practically the same across the tested driver configurations.

There also wasn't any real overall difference in the GPU memory usage.

And the overall GPU usage was effectively the same.

But where there is a difference is with the system (RAM) memory consumption. While the 396.18 driver has elevated memory use compared to 390.48 stable, the 396.18 driver with the new Vulkan SPIR-V compiler saw the lowest memory use overall. In many Vulkan games the system memory usage was noticeably lower. Overall though it came down to about 250MB in RAM savings on average while the peak memory usage was lower by just about 100MB compared to 390.48 stable.

This new NVVM Vulkan SPIR-V compiler and other improvements in the 396.18 Linux driver shall make for an interesting spring. The performance is largely unchanged but the system memory use is lower and your games may load a few seconds quicker with the new compiler, aside from when loading a previously cached shader.