NVIDIA 396.18 Linux Benchmarks, Testing Their New Vulkan SPIR-V Compiler

Dawn of War III was within frames of each other when testing these driver combinations. Worth noting is that the old compiler on the 396.18 driver dipped as low as 30 FPS while with the newer compiler the minimum frame-rate was 85 FPS. On the first run of DoW3, the new compiler led to the game loading three seconds quicker.

Not much of a difference in the system vitals besides seeing the memory usage being much higher on the 396.18 with the old compiler compared to the new compiler, but the 390.48 vRAM usage was in line with 396.18 on the new compiler stack.

Dawn of War III with Vulkan with more intense settings led to a few frames better performance with the new compiler.

But worth noting here is there is better system memory usage now with the new compiler than with the old compiler or on the 390.48 stable driver.

Though Dawn of War 3 with low quality settings saw a few frame loss with the new compiler.

The system memory use continued being elevated with the old compiler.