NVIDIA 375 vs. RADV+RadeonSI Mesa 13.1-dev Vulkan Benchmarks For Ending 2016

The latest installment of our year-end benchmarks is focusing upon the performance of the NVIDIA Linux driver against the open-source Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver found within Mesa 13.1-dev. This comparison is particularly interesting given the continuous flow of improvements into Mesa Git, the NVIDIA 375.26 driver release from last week, the big Dota 2 7.00 update debuted earlier this month, and Croteam's Vulkan improvements have rolled into TTP stable.

Tested on the AMD side were the followign graphics cards that are supported (non-experimental) by AMDGPU DRM for RADV compatibility include the R9 285, RX 460, RX 480, and R9 Fury. Experimental GCN 1.0/1.1 benchmarks with RADV to come in its own article. For those curious about AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 fresh benchmarks on that front, I'll post some more soon albeit there obviously is no changes over my earlier 16.50 benchmarks given the infrequent hybrid driver releases.

On the NVIDIA side was the 375.26 driver as their latest stable release as of one week ago. Tested cards there were the GeForce GTX 650, GTX 680, GTX 780 Ti, GTX 950, GTX 960, GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1080.

Dota 2 7.00 and The Talos Principle were obviously the Vulkan test cases used for this Linux driver/GPU comparison. The CPU utilization was also monitored during the benchmarking process via our open-source Phoronix Test Suite for those curious about the CPU usage differences with OpenGL vs. Vulkan.