NVIDIA 396.18 Linux Benchmarks, Testing Their New Vulkan SPIR-V Compiler

Dota 2 at 4K with Vulkan saw about the same frame-rate, though using the old compiler on the 396.18 release was causing greater variance. Though with the new compiler, the run-time on the first run (prior to using any cached shaders) dropped from 30 seconds to 25 seconds though on subsequent runs the run-time was similar at about 19 seconds.

With Mad Max on Vulkan, the performance was roughly in line with the old compiler. Like with Dota 2, the first run of the game prior to any shader caching was a few seconds quicker when making use of their new NVVM-based shader compiler stack..

The CPU usage was roughly the same during this long-running benchmark.

While the GPU memory usage was slightly higher than on the older 390.48 driver branch.

And the GPU is kept busy pretty much constantly with this benchmark...

On the 396.18 driver with the new shader compiler, the memory usage is about 600MB less than with the old compiler... But that actually appears to be a regression with the old compiler in moving to 396 as back on the 390.48 driver with the old compiler its system RAM usage was similar to 396.18 on the new compiler.