Vulkan API Performance Review – The Talos Principle

Game Settings and 4K 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 3840×2160 for both the screen resolution and the Max 3D rendering MPIX. We will be playing the game with no AA options enabled. 

4K Results

Moving to 4K we see that AMD is the performance leader in all of the graphical APIs, with Nvidia trailing behind by a mere 5FPS in all of the different APIs. 

Moving from OpenGL to Vulkan at 4K gives us around 10% more performance, which is pretty good for a game with Beta support fro the API and with beta drivers from AMD and Nvidia. 

While the performance of Vulkan is not as high as DirectX 11, it is a major leap when compared to OpenGL, so games using Vulkan is expected to be very helpful for games on OSX and Linux. We must also remember that DirectX 11 is the default option and that we are using a beta implementation of Vulkan, so a great deal of improvement could still be made to the Vulkan version and the DirectX 11 version has no doubt had more work put into it.