Vulkan vs. OpenGL Performance For Linux Games

Dawn of War 3 doesn't run well at 1440p on these lower-end graphics cards, but for what it's worth, the Vulkan performance was slightly higher on both graphics cards.

And the Vulkan CPU usage remained in great shape.

With Serious Sam 3: BFE, the Vulkan performance was noticeably better on both sets of drivers/GPUs. There are no CPU usage results recorded for this test since when running the Radeon tests there was a manual unsupported driver message box that had to be clicked and thus not fully automated so introduced a bit of variance into those metrics compared to the other test cases being fully automated with the Phoronix Test Suite.

When it comes to the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance, on the NVIDIA side it was near universally better using the Vulkan renderer in these games over OpenGL. With the Radeon RX 560 Polaris graphics card the performance was mixed depending upon the game, but worst case scenario is the Vulkan performance was a few frames lower than OpenGL. What was noticeable in all of the tests was much lower CPU utilization when using the Vulkan renderer on both the Radeon (RADV) and NVIDIA Linux drivers.