Intel Kabylake OpenGL/Vulkan Performance With Serious Sam 3 BFE 2017 Update

This weekend I posted a comparison of OpenGL/Vulkan performance for Radeon and NVIDIA GPUs with Serious Sam 3: BFE now that it's updated to the Vulkan-enabled "Fusion" 2017 update. For those curious about the Intel HD Graphics gaming potential for this game, here are some results.

With the RADV/RadeonSI and NVIDIA testing we found Serious Sam 3 BFE had the potential to be much faster with Vulkan over OpenGL. Thus I was especially curious to see how it would do on the Intel front with HD Graphics 630 / Kabylake GT2. Tests were done from an Intel Core i7 7700K system running Ubuntu 17.04 with the Linux 4.12 kernel and Mesa 17.2-dev via the Padoka PPA.

And off to the races we went with the Phoronix Test Suite.

With low quality settings and a resolution of just 1280 x 1024, Kabylake GT2 graphics were above a 60 FPS average.

Unlike with RADV and NVIDIA, the Intel graphics performance was similar between the i965 OpenGL Mesa and ANV Vulkan drivers.

1080p with low quality settings with this current-generation Intel hardware had less than a 50 FPS average.



When talking high quality settings, that's 30 FPS or less with the Core i7 7700K graphics.


While not playable frame-rates, the Vulkan performance continued to perform from on-par with the OpenGL results to slightly faster. Not as great as the discrete GPU results, but interesting anyhow.