NVIDIA vs. Radeon Vulkan & OpenGL Performance With A Celeron, Pentium & Core i7

[ua=42]

Yeah. On OpenGl AMD is definitely competitive on a $/fps level.

I wonder how long it will be until Vulkan catches up as well?

[Michael]

Very interesting tests Michael, great job!

It would've also been interesting to include the corresponding AMDGPU-PRO results.

Not worthwhile most of the time when it means needing to install Ubuntu 16.04 for nice compatibility with -PRO.... Already likely not going to break even on this article with all the tests run taking close to 3 days versus not bringing in enough revenue.

[orome]

Can I tweak that slightly ? The real benefits are for lower end CPUs relative to GPU performance. In the Intel world that means lower end dual-core parts with high-ish clocks (or also our Stoney Ridge APU) but it could just as easily mean more even lower clocked cores eg. current ARM parts.

vulkan will also benefit APU iGPUs. Since thermal and power budget is shared, lower CPU utilization means more room for the GPU.

[humbug]

Not worthwhile most of the time when it means needing to install Ubuntu 16.04 for nice compatibility with -PRO....

hopefully the next amdgpu pro release will support modern kernels and distros... In addition to improved vulkan performance.

[Michael]

hopefully the next amdgpu pro release will support modern kernels and distros... In addition to improved vulkan performance.

They have communicated they just intend to support the LTS/enterprise distros and appear to be no policy change yet AFAIK.

[bintsmok]

Can I tweak that slightly ? The real benefits are for lower end CPUs relative to GPU performance. In the Intel world that means lower end dual-core parts with high-ish clocks (or also our Stoney Ridge APU) but it could just as easily mean more even lower clocked cores eg. current ARM parts.

Serious Sam 3: BFE also benefits from Vulkan even if using a Core i7 7700 + GTX 970.

https://www.back2gaming.com/reviews/b2g-games/serious-sam-3-bfe-now-updated-fusion-2017/

[suberimakuri]

Interesting tests! Cheers Michael.

[suberimakuri]

Have just gone from Haswell i3 to Sandy bridge i7... Life is good. Just need to dump the silly 960 for Vega.

[JAYL]

Can I tweak that slightly ? The real benefits are for lower end CPUs relative to GPU performance. In the Intel world that means lower end dual-core parts with high-ish clocks (or also our Stoney Ridge APU) but it could just as easily mean more even lower clocked cores eg. current ARM parts.

Is this not also true for high end multicore CPUs like R7 CPUs(relative to other high end processors)? AKAIK you can better multithread vulkan because you aren't limited to a single thread submitting rendering tasks. Admittedly I'm a little ignorant on this/the proper terminology. I was always under the impression that vulkan theoretically would scale better with more cores.

Edit: I just read jrch2k8's comment which basically was a response to my question before I asked it.

[humbug]

Is this not also true for high end multicore CPUs like R7 CPUs(relative to other high end processors)? AKAIK you can better multithread vulkan because you aren't limited to a single thread submitting rendering tasks. Admittedly I'm a little ignorant on this/the proper terminology. I was always under the impression that vulkan theoretically would scale better with more cores.

Edit: I just read jrch2k8's comment which basically was a response to my question before I asked it.

Yep the reason it doesn't scale beyond a certain point is that for a given workload once the CPU horsepower passes a certain threshold the bottleneck shifts to other areas.
So adding more cores beyond that point may be spreading the load but it doesn't make a frame output faster because it is no longer the limiting factor anyway.
If you want to build something with a massive amount of stuff on screen and huge number of draw calls then this threshold will be harder to reach and you will see more FPS scaling with higher end CPUs. There is such a game (Ashes of the Singularity) coming to Vulkan soon but Windows only for now. Star Citizen too may scale like that once their Vulkan renderer is ready.