Early OpenGL vs. Vulkan Linux Benchmarks With Talos Principle

Now that with a workaround it's possible getting Talos Principle playing fine on Linux with the Vulkan renderer, here are the first OpenGL vs. Vulkan benchmarks atop Ubuntu and tests done with the NVIDIA beta driver on a few graphics cards as well as attempted trying an Intel Skylake system with the open-source Mesa Vulkan/Anvil code.

With Croteam having sorted out the Vulkan Linux renderer support and native 64-bit binary support, the initial Linux build is now publicly available while the Windows build has been available since launch day.

As outlined in my lengthy Vulkan 1.0 Linux article, the performance for early Vulkan game ports is expected to not be optimal and in many cases can be slower than existing, optimized OpenGL rendering paths. However, as many Phoronix readers have been wanting to see Vulkan vs. OpenGL Linux benchmarks... Here are some.

The initial tests were done with the NVIDIA 355 Vulkan beta driver on a Core i7 5960X Haswell-E system running Ubuntu 15.10 with the Linux 4.2 kernel. The graphics cards I used for the initial tests were a GeForce GTX 680, GTX 960, GTX 980, and GTX TITAN X.

I did attempt to run Talos Principle with Vulkan on a Fedora 23 system using the Intel Mesa Vulkan driver on a Core i5 Skylake system with HD Graphics 530, but that continues to run into problems during the main loading screen. Once the Intel Vulkan Linux driver is more mature, I'll be back with more tests. Likewise, once the AMD Vulkan Linux driver is public.

Keeping in mind the Vulkan support is very preliminary with Talos Principle, on the following page are the initial OpenGL vs. Vulkan test results at 1440p.