18-Way NVIDIA/AMD Linux Performance For Dawn Of War III

[Kohrias]

@Michael: Thanks for the benchmark, highly appreciated. I would like to compile mesa with ARB_bindless_texture support for AMD myself (I use Debian, not Ubuntu). Is there a git repository which includes these patches?

[humbug]

Ya need to include amdgpu pro in any Vulkan benchmarks. It is the fastest AMD Vulkan driver for now...

But very useful article.

[Davidovitch]

I thought it might be, but in that case, does it not make using such a high-end CPU a little misleading for people? The vast majority of people likely have mid-range hardware, so people looking at all your benchmarks are likely seeing results they will never see themselves. We need more variation in the processors used, otherwise these are essentially pie in the sky stuff for most people.

I am also interested in seeing how the combination of CPU and /GPU affects performance. The obvious problem with performing such tests is that you either need a lot of identical motherboards/memory/hdd or spent a lot of time in switching in/out CPU's (think of all the cooling paste you need to waste and time spent on re-installing the cooler over and over again). Maybe we can pool together some financial resources and ask Michael what kind of money/time requirements there would be for organizing such a test?

[Michael]

There will be some Ryzen tests soon for those wondering.

[aufkrawall]

Please with acpi-cpufreq performance.

Edit: According to the minimum fps, the game stutters like garbage on Nvidia, despite of the higher avg-fps?

[johanb]

In the CPU-bound cases, Vulkan does better. Perhaps due to them using a slower CPU.

Apparently they are using a i7 5960x so the CPU certainly shouldn't be the bottleneck though.

[dungeon]

The results are confusing indeed.

The GoL benchmark shows Vulkan practically always doing better at 1080p, literally the direct opposite of what Phoronix is showing: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articl...rt-report.9802

They don't have as much of course, but it shows Vulkan doing much better than in Phoronix testing.

I must be blind or my definition of 'always' differ or maybe there is something in the sky - is that Superman or ...

GoL article shows that on Low/Mid/High setting GL/VK perform the same on average, while on Higher/Max settings there is about ~8 to 9% difference in favor of VK... basically even that is in "who cares" area

[dungeon]

Plus/Minus 10% = definition of "who cares"

It is better to mention things like how game recieved mixed reviewes on steam 6/10 and price of 60€, does it have that Incorporated 3rd-party DRM: Denuvo Antitamper on Linux, cross platform miltiplayer yes/no, etc... that would be more interesting to know for readers

There is a lot of

reviews there and for 60€ people can buy even new nVidia card these days

[NihilMomentum]

it seems that nvidia cards provide better support both to vulkan and opengl on video games.

A good comparison would be using mesa drivers on all the cards although I ignore if mesa drivers implement vulkan api.

Look at the minimums of Nvidia cards. They are horrible compared to AMD cards. And in various situations the normal Fury is even matching the 980Ti.

[gamerk2]

With this newest Vulkan-supported Linux game, the Vulkan renderer is faster than OpenGL... But from our tests so far is primarily for the very CPU-bound cases, like well below 1080p. At higher resolutions and/or with more demanding visual quality settings, the Vulkan performance is on-par with OpenGL -- under NVIDIA. Currently with RADV, the Vulkan performance is short of OpenGL.

Again, this is expected. Vulkan sees the most benefit by virtue of having significantly lower CPU overhead then OpenGL. On less powerful GPUs or in CPU bound situations (anything below 1080p), Vulkan will almost always be faster. But as the bottleneck moves toward the GPU, these improvements become secondary to GPU performance as far as FPS goes; the GPU simply becomes the limiting factor.

Point being: A Graphic API isn't going to magically make the GPU do more work. Vulkan can remove CPU side bottlenecks, but in GPU bound situations, will perform about the same as OpenGL does.