Vulkan vs. OpenGL Performance For Linux Games

First up are the Dota 2 results.

The Ryzen 5 box with the RX 580 and GTX 1050 Ti were capable of playing Dota 2 at 1080p. The OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance for Dota 2 hasn't changed much since our last comparison with the OpenGL renderer still generally delivering slightly higher performance with OpenGL.

But what continues to be seen when using Vulkan is noticeably lower CPU usage and it's no difference with the Ryzen 5 1400 system. Under OpenGL with both GPUs/drivers the average CPU usage was around 28% but with the Vulkan renderer that dropped to about 22~23%. Not bad when the frame-rates are similar.

Dota 2 at 1440p was still playable on both graphics cards but the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti was now delivering better performance over the RX 560. The RX 560 was seeing a few frames higher performance now on RADV Vulkan while the GTX 1050 Ti performance was similar between the graphics rendering APIs.

The CPU usage difference is much more noticeable here with close to a 10% drop in the average CPU usage when using Vulkan while the peak CPU usage is also much lower now than with OpenGL. On both GPUs/drivers the peak CPU usage with Vulkan was 30~35% while under OpenGL was topping out at about 50%.