A Final Look At The OpenGL vs. Vulkan Performance For Talos Principle

When running at 1080p on the tested NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards which makes the game rather CPU bound, the performance was a bit of a surprise. The public beta build actually regresses the performance a lot at 1080p compared to the stable build. But the stable results do show that the mature Vulkan support in The Talos Principle with the mature NVIDIA Vulkan driver support means a great deal better performance than the OpenGL renderer.

The CPU usage was similar between the tested scenarios except for the "new Vulkan" (public beta) build coming in slightly higher.

The new public beta with updated engine did keep the GPU busier overall.

With 4K, the public beta performance did not regress compared to the stable version of Talos Principle. These results at 4K where its more demanding on this high-end hardware than 1080p provide an interesting, realistic look at the performance advantages to Vulkan. The GTX 1060 was already 13% faster with Vulkan while switching to the updated engine yields another 10% increase in frame-rates. With the GTX 1080, going from OpenGL to Vulkan yields a 23% increase in performance and an additional 8% with this beta build.

The CPU usage was slightly higher with the beta build at 4K.

The GPU was also kept busier with the beta build while the OpenGL vs. Vulkan data was similar on the stable build.

So at the end of the road for The Talos Principle's OpenGL support, the GeForce GTX 1060 can top out at about 25% faster while the GTX 1080 is 35% faster with the very latest Vulkan renderer support.