A Final Look At The OpenGL vs. Vulkan Performance For Talos Principle

The Talos Principle was the launch title for Vulkan 1.0 when the graphics API debuted three years ago as an alternative to Croteam's OpenGL renderer. Since then Croteam has rolled out its Vulkan support to their other games and now they are in the process of finally phasing out the OpenGL renderer with The Talos Principle. Here's a last look at how the OpenGL and Vulkan performance compares for this multi-platform game.

At the end of last week, Croteam published a new public beta of The Talos Principle that updates the engine in use. Along with a lot of other "under the hood" changes is also "full" support for Vulkan and Direct3D 12 (on Windows) while phasing out the OpenGL and Direct3D 9 renderers along with other optimizations.

I ran some benchmarks of the current stable build of The Talos Principle with OpenGL and Vulkan and then again with the new beta build and its improved Vulkan renderer. Tests were done with a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 1080 on the same system. Radeon tests were left out as with RADV the performance seems to be strangely slower on the current public beta build, so until sorting out that odd behavior, just looking at the NVIDIA Linux performance.

These OpenGL/Vulkan Linux benchmarks were carried out via the Phoronix Test Suite at 1080p and 4K while also monitoring the CPU and GPU usage between the three tested scenarios.