NVIDIA 387.12 Vulkan vs. OpenGL Performance Across Multiple CPUs

Dota 2 with the GeForce GTX 1060 across the three tested processors were about 7% faster than the OpenGL results for this Source Engine 2 game.

Not only are the Vulkan frame-rates better, but the CPU usage is noticeably lower as well. With the Core i3 8100 $120 USD processor, the average CPU usage with OpenGL was 54% while running this game but only 31% with Vulkan and a peak of just 48% compared to a 73% peak with OpenGL. The Core i5 8400 and i7 8700K also had noticeable drops in CPU utilization when using the Vulkan renderer.

The Talos Principle was the Vulkan launch title and has traditionally been well optimized for this new Khronos graphics API. With our tests across the three CPUs, the GeForce GTX 1060 was about 25% faster with Vulkan over OpenGL.

The average CPU usage wasn't too different, but the peak CPU usage did noticeably drop compared to OpenGL.