Updated Portal 2 Vulkan Rendering Code Yielding Great Radeon Results

Valve on Monday rolled out a new Portal 2 build that improves its new Vulkan renderer support. For those interested here are some fresh benchmarks of Portal 2 with OpenGL and Vulkan on the open-source AMD Radeon Linux drivers.

In February was the surprise announcement of Vulkan rendering API support for Portal 2. Valve is making use of Vulkan with Portal 2 by leveraging the DXVK native library for translating the game's existing Direct3D 9 usage to Vulkan. The existing OpenGL support for Portal 2 on Linux remains available.

Valve yesterday released their first significant Portal 2 update since the initial Vulkan rendering support last month. Some of the specific improvements in this latest Portal 2 update include "massively improved" performance for multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) with AMD graphics hardware, overall performance improvements, and a large number of bug fixes -- including many Linux-specific fixes.

With this latest Portal 2 update on Steam I carried out some fresh OpenGL vs. Vulkan benchmarks on Linux. Tests were done using the RADV Vulkan driver and RadeonSI for OpenGL. The graphics cards tested were the Radeon RX 590, Radeon VII, RX 5700 XT, RX 6800, and RX 6800 XT. Mesa 21.1-devel with Linux 5.11 was in use atop Ubuntu 20.10.

This round of testing is still Radeon-only due to hitting odd vsync issues with Portal 2 on NVIDIA.