AMD vs. NVIDIA Vulkan & OpenGL Linux Performance With The New Drivers

First up is Talos Principle at 4K with tests on both the OpenGL and Vulkan renderers for the available NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards.

We see immediately that the AMD GPU-PRO driver stack is much faster with the Vulkan renderer than OpenGL for The Talos Principle. The performance improvement allowed the Radeon graphics cards to be much more competitive with the NVIDIA graphics cards. It's also good to see that either through the recent beta updates to TTP and/or the latest NVIDIA Linux driver, using Vulkan on the NVIDIA driver has too resulted in a performance improvement compared to the initial launch-day tests where it was slower than using the default OpenGL code-path. While the PRO driver stack allowed the AMD hardware to better compete with the NVIDIA offerings, the green side remained in the lead with the GTX 980 still coming out measurably ahead of the R9 Fury, the GTX 960 rolling past the R9 290, and the R9 285 getting beaten out by a GTX 950.

For some extra data points using the inaugural AMD Vulkan Linux driver, some 1920 x 1080 data points for this Vulkan launch title. Using the Vulkan renderer at the lower resolution is still much faster than this OpenGL driver stack ported from AMD's Catalyst closed-source code-base.