Vulkan Continues To Show Its Gaming Strength On Low-End Hardware

Talos Principle ran into some strange behavior with the OpenGL performance (perhaps due to the only 2GB vRAM size on this GTX 1050?) but the Vulkan performance put it in line with the RX 560. With the RX 560, the Vulkan performance was faster than OpenGL.

The CPU usage with the NVIDIA Vulkan support was lower than OpenGL. When looking at the CPU usage during Radeon testing with The Talos Principle, the RADV driver usage led to a slightly higher average CPU use but a lower peak CPU utilization.

Lastly are some results from Feral's latest port, F1 2017. F1 2017 is Vulkan-only but I included some results for those curious about this racing game on Linux....

With ultra low settings at 1080p, the RX 560 was slightly faster than the GTX 1050. Both had similar minimum frame-rates.

The overall CPU usage was on average lower with the GTX 1050, but the RX 560 peak CPU usage was lower.

With high quality settings at 1080p, both GPUs and current drivers had an average FPS around 60 FPS and their minimum FPS around 50+ FPS.

The CPU usage with NVIDIA was again on average lower but its peak CPU usage was higher.

These results show the RADV Vulkan driver still have more room to advance and mature compared to RadeonSI, but at least it's continuing to beat the open-source OpenGL driver in some of the tested Linux games. With the mature NVIDIA OpenGL/Vulkan Linux driver support, the Vulkan performance on the GeForce GTX 1050 generally was much faster than using OpenGL. For both the Radeon and GeForce drivers, when using Vulkan the CPU usage on the Ryzen 3 tended to be noticeably lower than when running the Linux games with OpenGL.