NVIDIA Vulkan Driver Shows Impressive Mad Max Linux Performance

Hours ago I posted some RADV vs. RadeonSI results on Mad Max which showed much progress for this first Feral Interactive Vulkan Linux game while the NVIDIA results do show much more impressive performance capabilities with this new graphics API. Here are some of my initial NVIDIA GeForce results for OpenGL vs. Vulkan with Mad Max on Linux while additional tests are on the way. It was just today that Linux game porter Feral Interactive rolled out a public beta of a Vulkan renderer for this originally DX11 Windows game.

Tests completed for this launch-day comparison were several of the NVIDIA Pascal cards including the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080 Ti. On Friday I'll likely have a larger comparison completed with the complete Pascal line-up plus Maxwell and some Kepler cards too. All of this NVIDIA Linux driver testing with the latest Mad Max public beta build is using the 378.13 driver release.

Using the Phoronix Test Suite's Mad Max test profile makes it easy to profile the performance differences of OpenGL vs. Vulkan for this game on NVIDIA hardware. Here are some comparisons of the two renderers when using a Core i7 7700K with GeForce GTX 1080 Ti atop Ubuntu 16.10 with NVIDIA 378.13.

With the Vulkan renderer, the CPU usage is noticeably lower....

While the GPU usage, is finally able to be maxed out with Vulkan thanks to no longer being CPU bound as is the case with OpenGL.

Let's see how the NVIDIA cards tested so far are running with Vulkan-ized Mad Max!