OpenGL vs. Vulkan Linux Gaming Performance Ending Out 2017

NVIDIA's Vulkan performance remains in great shape and with the latest Vulkan-compatible Steam Linux games we are seeing about the same performance between OpenGL and Vulkan. In rare cases, the Vulkan performance is surpassing OpenGL on NVIDIA, but overall most current-generation Linux game engines aren't yet fully equipped to take advantage of lower-level graphics APIs like Vulkan for really exploiting the performance potential of the API. It will be interesting to see how things play out in 2018.

Besides the performance, when looking at the CPU usage, using Vulkan does deliver a significant reduction in CPU usage:

Running these games with the Vulkan renderer was yielding a measurable drop in the CPU utilization as recorded via the Phoronix Test Suite.

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