Vulkan vs. OpenGL On Linux With Core i5, Core i7, Ryzen 7

First up was Dota 2 at 1080p. The Vulkan performance on the higher-end Ryzen 7 / Core i7 was noticeably slower than the OpenGL performance with RadeonSI. RADV has made much progress in performance recently, but still has a ways to go for matching AMDGPU-PRO Vulkan performance in some games/workloads as well as hitting the maturity of the RadeonSI OpenGL driver. With the Core i5 7600K, we actually saw greater Vulkan performance than OpenGL by a few frames. Too bad no Ryzen 5 for comparison on the AMD side. The Core i7 7700K ended up being faster than the Ryzen 7 1800X for OpenGL performance at 1080p.

There is noticeably lower CPU usage across all tested systems when using Vulkan instead of OpenGL.

Dota 2 at 4K saw roughly similar performance on the three tested systems with the Vulkan performance being about 80% the speed of RadeonSI/OpenGL.

While the CPU usage difference continues to be definitely noticeable on the Core i5 box.