NVIDIA vs. Radeon Vulkan & OpenGL Performance With A Celeron, Pentium & Core i7

Here is an interesting OpenGL vs. Vulkan Linux benchmark comparison where I take two competing NVIDIA and AMD cards, the Radeon RX 580 and GeForce GTX 1060, and test the available benchmark-friendly OpenGL/Vulkan Linux games while doing these tests each on an Intel Celeron, Pentium, and Core i7 processors in looking at the performance scaling.

The Radeon RX 580 and GeForce GTX 1060 were each tested on the same system when swapping out the CPUs for the Intel Celeron G3930, Pentium G4600, and Core i7 7700K. From these tests we get an interesting look at the CPU performance scaling for Linux gaming on both Radeon and NVIDIA, how the OpenGL vs. Vulkan performance compares on different CPUs, and simply how these two competing graphics cards are battling it out with the current state of Linux and its GPU drivers.

Ubuntu 17.04 x86_64 was running on the system during testing with the Linux 4.12.0 kernel. The Radeon RX 580 was tested with Mesa 17.2-dev as of this week using the Padoka PPA and LLVM 5.0 SVN. The GeForce GTX 1060 was tested with the 384.47 beta driver. No other changes were made during the testing process besides swapping out the GPUs and CPUs.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite the available Linux games with Vulkan renderers for benchmarking were Dota 2, Dawn of War III, Mad Max, Serious Sam 3 BFE, and The Talos Principle.

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