Basemark GPU DX12 VS Vulkan Performance Review

4K Testing

By default, Basemark GPU’s primary graphical test is run at 4K High settings, maximising GPU load to make the benchmark primarily GPU limited. At this resolution, we will run tests in the benchmark at default (High) settings and see which GPU manufacturer and API offers the highest performance levels when things are as GPU constrained as possible.

4K Results  

In the graph below we can see a similar trend to our 1080p results, though this time AMD’s graphics cards put up a better fight against their Geforce counterparts, with the RX Vege 56 surpassing the GTX 1070 and the RX 580 surpass the GTX 1060 when using the DirectX 12 or Vulkan APIs.    

OpenGL remains a weak spot for AMD, even at 4K with Nvidia’s GTX series GPUs offering similar performance levels on all APIs at 4K. This is precisely why we decided to test Basemark GPU at lower resolutions, as this better highlights the shortcomings of the OpenGL API. 

To order this chart we took an average of results for all three APIs, which is why AMD’s graphics cards sit below their Nvidia counterparts. Sadly our tester has no Nvidia RTX series graphics cards in-house to add to our API testing in Basemark GPU.