OpenGL vs. Vulkan Performance For Portal 2 With Radeon Linux Graphics

With Valve's Portal 2 having added a Vulkan renderer by way of DXVK for converting Direct3D calls to Vulkan, here are some initial benchmarks with several different AMD Radeon graphics cards for seeing the performance of this nearly decade old game on Linux with the existing OpenGL rendering path compared to that of the new Vulkan rendering option.

This weekend article is just offering an initial look at the Portal 2 OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance on Linux using the initial update that introduced this new option. More benchmarks will be coming after Portal 2's next imminent update coming out next week. Likewise, NVIDIA GeForce Linux benchmarks should be coming at that point too barring any issues.

From my testing with RADV via Mesa 21.1-devel, the Vulkan rendering performance with Portal 2 has been working out very well. In today's articles are benchmarks using Linux 5.11 + Mesa 21.1-devel of RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan.

The graphics cards tested at 1080p / 1440p / 4K for this preliminary testing were the Radeon RX 590, RX Vega 56, Radeon VII, RX 5600 XT, RX 5700 XT, RX 6800, and RX 6800 XT.

At 1080p there was a clear upside to using the new Vulkan rendering option across this range of tested Radeon graphics cards. For the Radeon RX 590 Polaris was 22% higher frame-rates on average while for the higher-end cards that advantage extended to over 50% higher frame-rates at 1080p... Granted, the game already runs very easily on today's graphics cards at 1080p even with OpenGL.