X-Plane 11 Flight Simulator With Vulkan Performing Very Well On Linux - NVIDIA/AMD OpenGL vs. Vulkan Benchmarks

Last week the X-Plane 11.50 beta was released with its long awaited Vulkan renderer to complement its mature OpenGL rendering code. Since then we've been busy benchmarking with 23 different graphics cards of AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce line-ups while running Ubuntu Linux and comparing the OpenGL vs. Vulkan rendering performance for this realistic flight simulator.

Ubuntu 20.04 in its near final state was used while for the Radeon graphics the default Linux 5.4 kernel was used paired with Mesa 20.1-devel from the Oibaf PPA. With this Radeon RADV Vulkan driver testing, worth noting is that RADV+ACO was used. The ACO compiler back-end yielded dramatically lower load times compared to the default AMDGPU LLVM code-path... The difference was incredible otherwise X-Plane 11.50 beta was loading very slow with RADV. On the NVIDIA side was the 440.64 driver. The cards tested included:

- GTX 980
- GTX 980 Ti
- GTX 1060
- GTX 1070
- GTX 1080
- GTX 1650 SUPER
- GTX 1660 SUPER
- RTX 2060
- RTX 2060 SUPER
- RTX 2070
- RTX 2070 SUPER
- RTX 2080
- RTX 2080 SUPER
- RTX 2080 Ti
- TITAN RTX
- RX 590
- RX Vega 56
- RX Vega 64
- RX 5500 XT
- RX 5600 XT
- RX 5700
- RX 5700 XT
- Radeon VII

With Mesa 20.1-devel RADV+ACO and NVIDIA 440.64, no issues were encountered during our X-Plane benchmarking.

I ran the X-Plane 11.50 beta benchmarks with OpenGL and Vulkan on all of the tested cards at 1080p, 1440, and 4K while using a variety of graphical pre-sets. All benchmarks were carried out via the Phoronix Test Suite.