Vulkan API Performance Review – The Talos Principle

Game Settings and 1440p Testing

One key thing that must be remembered here we are testing a Beta release of The Talos Principle and are using Beta drivers from both AMD and Nvidia, so results from here will not be representative of all titles, but it gives us a great look at what to expect when compared to OpenGL, the Khronos Group’s old graphics API.

Game Settings 

The game will be run at Ultra settings, with a resolution of 2560×1440 for both the screen resolution and the Max 3D rendering MPIX. We will be playing the game with no AA options enabled. 

1440p Results

The 1440p results for this game are very interesting as the 1080p results for this title, with us again seeing that the Vulkan Version of the Game does not perform as well as DirectX 11 version. When we compare the Vulkan performance to OpenGL however we see a massive perfroamce increase, which is great to see as it is OpenGL that it is replacing and is currently used in pretty much all Mac OS and Linux games on PC. 

When compared to OpenGL we can see a great deal of performance improvement, giving a 12FPS boost to Nvidia and a 22FPS boost to AMD. Since OpenGL is the API that is used for the Linux and Mac versions of the game, Vulkan represents a opportunity to gain a lot of extra performance and efficiency on these platforms, making Vulkan a must for anyone making a game for these platform.