AMDGPU-PRO vs. NVIDIA On Linux With OpenGL & Vulkan

With Croteam recently having released an updated Talos Principle with better Vulkan performance and the NVIDIA 375.20 and AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 both having come out recently, here is a fresh OpenGL and Vulkan graphics API performance comparison when using Valve's Dota 2 and The Talos Principle, both of which games on Linux offer both graphics API renderers.

This article is a look at the latest NVIDIA vs. AMDGPU-PRO performance with the newest drivers for both OpenGL and Vulkan. A follow-up article will include results when testing the RadeonSI Gallium3D and RADV Vulkan driver code too. A fresh Windows vs. Linux OpenGL/Vulkan performance comparison is also being worked on as thanks to our readers this holiday season. This is all thanks to those that support Phoronix via viewing the site without ads, making a holiday tip, or joining our premium program, such as through this week's Thanksgiving event. Plus a number of other exciting unrelated Linux graphics articles coming out in the days ahead.

The Talos Principle and Dota 2 were up-to-date with Valve on Linux as of 20 November, including the recent Talos Principle Vulkan optimizations. Tested with the NVIDIA 375.20 driver was the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 1050, GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080. On the AMD side tested with AMDGPU-PRO 16.40 were the Radeon R9 285, R9 290, RX 460, RX 480, and R9 Fury. Basically testing all of the newer, interesting cards I had available for an interesting look at how these drivers supporting the two main graphics API out of Khronos are performing as we approach the holidays 2016.

All tests were done on the same Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake system running Ubuntu 16.04 with the Linux 4.4 kernel. All of these Dota 2 and Talos Principle benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the Phoronix Test Suite (including the recent improvements to the talos-principle test profile) and OpenBenchmarking.org.