Left 4 Dead 2 Vulkan Performance With Radeon Graphics On Linux

Last week Valve introduced Vulkan rendering support for Left 4 Dead 2. The L4D2 Vulkan support is similar to that of Portal 2 where DXVK is being leveraged for translating the Direct3D calls to Vulkan rather than relying on their OpenGL translations. For those wondering what this means for L4D2 performance on Linux with modern GPUs, here are some benchmarks of Left 4 Dead 2 when testing the OpenGL and Vulkan rendering options.

For those curious about the Left 4 Dead 2 Vulkan performance I ran some benchmarks on Ubuntu 21.04 with a few Radeon GPUs (RX Vega 56, RX 5500 XT, RX 5600 XT, RX 6700 XT, RX 6800, and RX 6800 XT) when using the game's OpenGL and Vulkan rendering options. Mesa 21.2-devel via the Oibaf PPA and Linux 5.13 Git provided the very latest open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver support.

This round of testing was from a Ryzen 9 5900X desktop. Only AMD Radeon graphics were tested due to running into an odd NVIDIA issue with L4D2 that led to vsync being unconditionally active. With using the Mesa graphics drivers, these Radeon tests mean RadeinSI OpenGL vs. RADV Vulkan drivers.