NVIDIA 387.12 Vulkan vs. OpenGL Performance Across Multiple CPUs

Published earlier this week was the Intel Core i3, i5, i7 With NVIDIA vs. AMD Radeon For Linux Gaming results that are quite interesting while in this article is looking at the OpenGL vs. Vulkan Linux gaming performance using NVIDIA's first-rate binary driver while also doing this graphics API/renderer comparison across the Intel Coffeelake processors from low-end to high-end.

This comparison is directly looking at the Vulkan vs. OpenGL performance with a GeForce GTX 1060 across Core i3 8100, Core i5 8400, and Core i7 8700K processors. What also makes this comparison even more interesting is using the new NVIDIA 387.12 Linux beta that has merged some Vulkan improvements for their driver.

The benchmark-friendly Vulkan-compatible Linux games of Dota 2, The Talos Principle, Serious Sam 3 BFE, Mad Max, and Dawn of War III were used for this interesting comparison atop Ubuntu 17.04. As well, during this automated benchmarking process run via the Phoronix Test Suite, the CPU usage was recorded by our open-source benchmarking software for looking at the CPU overhead in the different configurations. One of the advantages of Vulkan is allowing for lower CPU utilization than OpenGL so it's always interesting to test that, especially when comparing multiple processors.