NVIDIA vs. AMD OpenGL & Vulkan Benchmarks With Valve's Dota 2

[computerquip]

Welcome surprise for the lower CPU utilization. If it stays that low after some optimization, it's a win just on the electricity bill.

[eydee]

Maybe the 980 Ti is the one that is "misbehaving", not all the others. It is better of course, but not that much better, especially compared to the 980. (We can see almost 200% performance.) I suggest running image quality tests too, if PTS can do it. This is all too fishy. Seeing Windows Direct3D results right next to these one could also be interesting.

[darkbasic]

WTF Michael, the whole point about Vulkan are CPU-bound scenarios, why did you test only 4K which is the less interesting resolution?

[SaucyJack]

Not sure what all of the hubbub is about, valve accomplished exactly what they were going for. Something PTS doesn't seem to cover is frame time variance, which they knocked down to ~15ms from ~45ms.

[SaucyJack]

Maybe the 980 Ti is the one that is "misbehaving", not all the others. It is better of course, but not that much better, especially compared to the 980. (We can see almost 200% performance.) I suggest running image quality tests too, if PTS can do it. This is all too fishy. Seeing Windows Direct3D results right next to these one could also be interesting.

Something fishy with a nvidia driver? Say it ain't so...

[schmidtbag]

Seems people here really aren't paying attention... Did you not read the page regarding CPU usage? Sure, he's using a high resolution, but Vulkan is already proving it's worth. The drop in CPU usage, even at 4K, is hugely significant. If you have a 1080p display and any of the GPUs that were tested, you don't need Vulkan.

[boxie]

Awesome to see some Vulkan tests I am pretty sure that Valve will be further optimising their game and learning lots about how to implement a Vulkan engine.

As for those that are complaining about "invalid tests" - STFU and quit your whining and whinging. Vulkan is supposed to help when CPU bound, but NOT regress otherwise.

[boxie]

Also - as a second thought. Since Vulkan renderers are multithreaded, and CPU overhead is lower - I wonder if the CPU governor has a bit more to play?

I might be blind but I could not see anything in the article about which CPU governor was used. It would be interesting to how different power states affect the game.

[justmy2cents]

Why are you benchmarking a new API whose primary purpose is to reduce CPU at 4K? All you are doing is measuring fill-rate and ensuring that the app is 100% GPU bound and CPU sitting mostly idle. If you actually want to see how Vulkan improves over OpenGL, you need to benchmark at much lower resolutions.

you should realize that if benchmark was done at scenario where cpu was at 100% it would be unreliable. once you hit 100% it will stay there and only lower frame rate. you can only reliably see the difference when neither scenario hits 100%. once you see how much lower cpu usage is, it is simple to know which cpu will now suffice

[jntesteves]

Seems people here really aren't paying attention... Did you not read the page regarding CPU usage? Sure, he's using a high resolution, but Vulkan is already proving it's worth. The drop in CPU usage, even at 4K, is hugely significant. If you have a 1080p display and any of the GPUs that were tested, you don't need Vulkan.

I think the drop in CPU usage can be directly attributed to the drop in framerate in this case. But even at 1080p and with said GPUs a load can still be CPU bound on weaker AMD CPUs or 15W laptop CPUs from Intel. I believe these would be much more interesting hardware to compare Vulkan with older APIs. I think the big selling point of Vulkan over OpenGL is in the mobile space, and gaming on small laptops will eat away desktops' market, eventually. Some smaller laptops are already out with 15W CPUs and still dubbed "gaming". I had a Lenovo Y40 two years ago, it had great graphics from AMD (10 CUs, 2GB), but the 15W CPU meant it would never stress the GPU. My current laptop with a much weaker GPU from AMD (6CUs, 1GB) always outperforms that one due to the 45W CPU alone.