Vulkan vs. OpenGL For Mad Max On AMD Ryzen

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 31 March 2017 at 10:42 AM EDT. Page 1 of 2. 21 Comments.

It's been fun benchmarking Vulkan vs. OpenGL with Mad Max, Feral's first Linux game port featuring a beta Vulkan renderer. With the Radeon benchmarks and many NVIDIA Pascal tests yesterday an Intel Core i7 Kabylake CPU was used while for this article is a Mad Max run with AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X.

In the NVIDIA test results yesterday I showed how with the Core i7 7700K, the CPU usage dropped noticeably while the GPU utilization went up heavily, as is designed to do with properly using Vulkan.

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Thanks to the test automation around the Phoronix Test Suite, it's easy to look at the various system sensors during testing. With the testing under Ryzen, the CPU usage has gone while the GPU usage goes up.

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With the Core i7 7700K tests yesterday with GTX 1080 Ti, the CPU usage was a 36% average with a peak of 54% under OpenGL while under Vulkan dropped to a 22% average with Vulkan and 38% peak. With the Ryzen 7 1800X paired with a GTX 1080, the CPU usage dropped from just 18.9% to 15.1%.

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The GPU usage had increased from an average of 50.3% to 58.8% while the peak went from 89% to 99%. The GPU utilization difference wasn't nearly as big of a difference with the Intel testing where the Pascal card went from 51% to 80% utilization. But still, even with Ryzen, it's a noticeable improvement.

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For those wondering if the memory usage is any different with Mad Max under OpenGL vs. Vulkan, it comes down to almost the same.

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The GPU temperature is only slightly higher with the greater utilization under Vulkan.

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And barely any difference in the GPU fan speed.

Next are the actual OpenGL vs. Vulkan benchmark results.


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