phoronix early Windows vs Linux Vulkan API benchmarks featuring The Talos Principle

[zMeul]

sources:

• https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Radeon-VLK-Windows-Linux
• https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Win10-Linux-Vulkan-Early

test system as per Phoronix:

• Ubuntu 16.04 with the Linux 4.4 kernel
• Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake
• MSI C236A Workstation motherboard
• 16GB of DDR4-2133MHz memory
• 120GB Samsung 850 SSD
• nVidia 364.72 / Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.4.1

results AMD:

results nVidia:

 

at least for now, nVidia's Vulkan driver stack seems to be a whole lot better optimized on Linux compared to AMD's

to note that the GTX970, in Linux, performs as good as a 980Ti in Windows

 

yes, I know you're gonna say "but dude, The Talos Principle Vulkan API is not fully implemented" - yes true, but! it's the same stew for everyone

 

future looks bright for Vulkan API and Linux gaming

[Liltrekkie]

It looks like AMD focused on Windows and NVIDIA focused on Linux? That may not be the actual case but from a first glance it seems that way. 

 

I'm a little surprised NVIDIA did so bad on windows when compared to AMD. I'm sure as Vulkan ages and is more fully featured it'll come down to drivers like it does on windows. 

[PawaYuza]

Cool beans! However, I think is it imperative to give Vulkan until the end of the year before we should be taking any numbers seriously. Very excited for the future of Linux. I, for one, am more than happy to convert my entire workflow to Linux as soon as possible. The more gamers we can get on Linux, the more developers we'll have to improve Linux.

[Nexxus]

3 minutes ago, Liltrekkie said:

It looks like AMD focused on Windows and NVIDIA focused on Linux? That may not be the actual case but from a first glance it seems that way. 

 

I'm a little surprised NVIDIA did so bad on windows when compared to AMD. I'm sure as Vulkan ages and is more fully featured it'll come down to drivers like it does on windows. 

I wouldn't say focused, nvidia isnt stupid they know their user base is more on windows.

likely the OS does simply allow for more fps since its lighter-weight (I assume, ive never used linux) and nvidia has the cash they can devote alot of time to each project. 

[Liltrekkie]

3 minutes ago, Nexxus said:

I wouldn't say focused, nvidia isnt stupid they know their user base is more on windows.

likely the OS does simply allow for more fps since its lighter-weight (I assume, ive never used linux) and nvidia has the cash they can devote alot of time to each project. 

As someone who uses Linux, Linux as as light of weight as you want. Some distros are better than others for this. just because it's "linux" doesn't mean it's automatically better. 

 

I will say though, Linux is better optimized, allowing for better management of resources. I'm not sure how Linux treats GPU's though. I don't have anything more powerful to spare other than a 5770. I would love to see this compared with other Linux distros to see whether the distro makes a difference FPS. 

[Guest]

Kind of regretting buying AMD. Tried playing Medieval 2 and units looked all kinds of messed up, which is apparently a known issue for which they suggest upgrading to a newer kernel, which I guess I'll do as soon as Mint based on 16.04 is released.

I keep telling myself I'll use the card for GPGPU eventually, where my 7950 should handily beat the roughly equally priced 960.

[Master Disaster]

Its more important that people understand that DX12 & Vulkan aren't some special sauce you can apply to any situation and come out on top.

 

Under some specific scenarios and workloads they do give a genuine boost to performance but in most cases they offer very little improvement against DX11 and in a few cases they can make performance worse.

 

The simple fact is, these numbers are meaningless as they don't have any comparative numbers to accompany them. For all we know they might have gotten better results out of DX11 or DX12. (And yeah I do get that they were comparing AMD V Nvidia on Win V Linux).

 

What's going to be the major moment (at least for me) is when Futuremark drop a DX11 v DX12 v Vulkan test on us, and they make 3D Mark work on Linux (something they've hinted quite strongly at in the past). Then we can get a true look at how these APIs stack up against each other.

[alamo]

as long as linux doesnt take off, i dont see AMD ( with shortage of money) invest in linux driver heavily, they probably put the minimum on it to have it somewhat working, so we probably gonna need a serious interest from Devs on linux gaming, before AMD gets off their arses and say ok we need to work on this.

all you need is an announcement of a couple triple A games on vulkan for that to happen.

[Dabombinable]

58 minutes ago, huilun02 said:

I hope Vulkan takes off so Microsoft can cry in a corner about their shitty Xbox

*DirectXbone

[Eroda]

would like to see a dx12 benchmark thrown in there  @ that resolution for windows Per GPU so we have a more solid reference point

[zMeul]

7 minutes ago, Eroda said:

would like to see a dx12 benchmark thrown in there  @ that resolution for windows Per GPU so we have a more solid reference point

the game doesn't support DX12, for now

[Sakkura]

Looks like Nvidia performance is somewhat higher than AMD in Ubuntu, but AMD crushes Nvidia in Windows. Like, the 290 and 970 are getting 87/81 and 61/92 FPS respectively in Win/Ubuntu.

[Humbug]

3 hours ago, Eroda said:

would like to see a dx12 benchmark thrown in there  @ that resolution for windows Per GPU so we have a more solid reference point

I get what you're saying but there is not much point in this case. Their vulkan renderer is very much work in progress and AMD's Linux vulkan drivers are also pre-release.

And the dev seems to have no plans for a DX12 renderer so we will probably never get that comparison from Talos Principle or future croteam games like Serious Sam 4. Once they do finish their vulkan renderer they will probably see no need for a DX12 backend... Unless they decide to port the games to xbox one.

 

Your best bet for direct side-by-side comparison is from unreal, frostbite or crytek engine sometime in the future. But again it will probably come down to which is a better implementation rather than which is a better API. i.e. a good vulkan implementation will obviously beat a haphazard DX12 implementation and vice versa. This is what a lot of people don't understand...

Most people in the industry don't expect any real performance differences between the two, at least in the long term. Having said that if you were talking about today then DX12 has been out for a year longer. So the ecosystem, the drivers, the developer know how, the tools etc will favor DX12 (in theory) on the short term.

 

4 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Its more important that people understand that DX12 & Vulkan aren't some special sauce you can apply to any situation and come out on top.

Yeah... graphics APIs are tools for the game developers. Not really something which end users need to get unrealistically hyped about.

 

However in the case of Vulkan one of the reasons the Linux community got hyped is that they needed a modern graphics API which didn't have the all the baggage and issues that the openGL ecosystem had. In the case of windows users DX11 was already performing well, for Linux users openGL was not performing well so vulkan was a bigger deal.

 

[BuckGup]

TAKE THAT DX12! Vulkan is supreme!

[WereCat]

Correct me if I am wrong but is the AMD result worse on Linux because they have not really well optimized drivers for it? We saw a lot lower performance for AMD almost all the time (like Fury X being on GTX 960 levels of performance in some scenarios).

 

 

[Trik'Stari]

5 hours ago, huilun02 said:

I hope Vulkan takes off so Microsoft can cry in a corner about their shitty Xbox

With the new G4WL looming, we all do.

[LAwLz]

Very interesting, but it is important to remember that these are very early results and they might change a lot in the coming months. I also think that it is important to put these numbers into relation to our current benchmark numbers for things like DirectX.

 

Here is another way to look at the results. I am using the 950 as a baseline for performance since it's the lowest performing one (using this performance summary from TechPowerUp).

Green = How much better the hardware is in current games than a 950.

Blue = how much better it is in Vulkan on Windows 10 compared to a 950.

Yellow = how much better it is in Vulkan in Ubuntu compared to a 950.

 

The sample is too small to draw any absolute conclusions from, but it seems like the performance is kind of all over the place at the moment.

AMD's performance in Ubuntu is appalling across the board, and the 970 is not doing well either (especially not in Windows). The 290 seems to scale well in Windows though, and the 980 Ti seems to scale well across the board.

But this is just one game with early drivers and the game is not really done either so hopefully (for Vulkan) it will get better as times goes on. What we want is for all three staples to be the same value for each card (or the blue and yellow one being taller than the green one).

[zMeul]

9 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

-

I'm waiting for Ubuntu 16.04 to get released, will be about 2 weeks from now, and will do my own testing

I wish I could do the same test on my HP laptop with a Radeon dGPU, but I can't access (replace) the HDD without breaking the warranty; and I really don't want to wipe the HDD and restore W10 afterwards either .. bummer

[Linus_torvalds]

16 minutes ago, zMeul said:

I'm waiting for Ubuntu 16.04 to get released, will be about 2 weeks from now, and will do my own testing

I wish I could do the same test on my HP laptop with a Radeon dGPU, but I can't access (replace) the HDD without breaking the warranty; and I really don't want to wipe the HDD and restore W10 afterwards either .. bummer

You can backup your windows installation with acronis true image home and then restore no one will see it. 

I have 4540s without dGPU and i can change HDD without breaking warranty because there are no screws. only HDD has screws. laptop itself just opens up from back. That's why i like HP probooks. I literally can change CPU, clean cooler, change HDD and DVD with taking only 4-5 screws.

[Admiral Naismith]

I'd like a good reason to go over to linux. It's just so painful every time I try... If performance stays better there however me and my gtx 970 are going that direction.

 

On a semi-unrelated note, Talos Principle is a great game. Loved every minute of it and recommend it to anyone who likes puzzle games and/or the portal series.

[patrickjp93]

2 minutes ago, Admiral Naismith said:

I'd like a good reason to go over to linux. It's just so painful every time I try... If performance stays better there however me and my gtx 970 are going that direction.

 

On a semi-unrelated note, Talos Principle is a great game. Loved every minute of it and recommend it to anyone who likes puzzle games and/or the portal series.

Have you tried Fedora, or Mint?

[Humbug]

3 minutes ago, Admiral Naismith said:

 

On a semi-unrelated note, Talos Principle is a great game. Loved every minute of it and recommend it to anyone who likes puzzle games and/or the portal series.

agreed. Top notch game, good graphics, and intriguing story.

[CTR640]

DX12 is exclusive to Windorks 10 while Vulkan can be used on W7, 8+ and other platforms.

I do say, take that Microsucks! I really hope Linux will be much more popular so devs can develop games for it

and not longer only for Windows (10)

Sure, like Microsoft cares about PC Gaming...

[Stadin6]

8 hours ago, Liltrekkie said:

It looks like AMD focused on Windows and NVIDIA focused on Linux? That may not be the actual case but from a first glance it seems that way. 

 

I'm a little surprised NVIDIA did so bad on windows when compared to AMD. I'm sure as Vulkan ages and is more fully featured it'll come down to drivers like it does on windows. 

AMD simply dosent have the capacity to optimise the linux drivers, so they focus on windows, the largest platform. Nvidia on the other hand has good drivers for linux and windows, and is therefore a better comparison between windows and linux.

[Kunter]

52 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

Have you tried Fedora, or Mint?

Fedora for someone who says he gets frustrated easily when switching to linux?

Sorry, but I think suggesting a RPM based is just not right for him.

Mint on the other hand might be the right choice for him, being based on Ubuntu with a more "windows-like" desktop. 

Additionally, since we are in a gaming related thread: distros close to Ubuntu/Debian might be a lot better for gaming than Red Hat related ones, just because Valves Steam OS is Debian based and therefor they are developing for Debian based systems.