Doom – 1080p, 1440p and 4K Vulkan Benchmarks
Switching the API from OpenGL to Vulkan has a dramatic effect on both the ranking order and frame rates. AMD cards benefit immensely from Vulkan’s lower CPU overheads and become much more competitive. For example, the R9 380X now destroys the ASUS STRIX GTX 960 and maintains a minimum frame-rate above 60. This means the frame-rate appears less jarring and the slight hitching has subsided. Next up is the GTX 970 which posts impressive numbers but falls behind the GTX 1060.
This time, the GTX 980 is easily beaten by the R9 390 and RX 480. Unbelievably, the R9 390X defeats the Titan X in the average frame-rate stakes while being much cheaper. The R9 Nano manages to maintain wonderful performance figures and the Fury X exhibits a massive frame-rate boost which is incredibly close to the GTX 1070. It’s not just improvements for AMD hardware though as the GTX 980Ti and GTX 1080 enjoy higher frame rates when using the Vulkan API.
Throughout the 1440p Vulkan benchmark, AMD products are in their element and I was astounded by the widespread performance gains. The Sapphire Nitro R9 380X achieves almost double the frame-rate of its closest rival and remains within touching distance of the GTX 970. The GTX 980 and GTX 1060 are well behind mid-tier AMD graphics solutions although they can provide a good 60 frames-per-second experience. Once again, the R9 390X outperformed the GTX Titan X which really defies belief.
The R9 Nano’s performance is marvellous and maintains the same minimum frame-rate as the Palit GameRock Premium GTX 1070. Here we can see, the R9 Fury X takes the third spot for the first time and outclasses one of the higher-end Pascal products. The GTX 980Ti and GTX 1080’s benefits are massively reduced and unlike those seen during the 1080p benchmark.
When the resolution is set to 4K, performance gains are practically non-existent on NVIDIA GPUs. This is probably down to many cards being unable to deal with the intense graphical preset and not having the required horsepower to leverage extra frames in Vulkan. While AMD hardware fares better, the advantage when using Vulkan is much less than you’d see in 1440p and 1080p testing. On the other hand, these minor changes are enough to make AMD cards catapult up the list and beat a large number of NVIDIA graphics cards.
The R9 380X performs better and should be able to offer a good frame-rate with lower settings. Also, the RX 480 and R9 390 offer much faster numbers than the GTX 980 which is worthy of praise. The R9 390X performed identically to the Titan X, while the R9 Nano and R9 Fury X couldn’t be separated. As expected, the GTX 1070 edges the R9 Fury X and almost surpasses the GTX 980Ti. The GTX 1080’s performance drops off slightly but it’s not by enough to warrant any concerns.
OMG! What’s wrong with the Titan X? It should perform as the 980 Ti. It got beaten by 390X and just 2-3 fps faster than the $260 RX 480, Lol. Titan X owners must be pissed off right now. BTW, AMD’s mid-range cards’ performance are fantastic, especially the RX 480’s performance.
It shows that when AMD release their HBM Polaris chips things are going to get very interesting.
I have a ASUS R9 290 DCII OC (4GB not the X version) and for the Demo on steam, both Open GL and Vulkan ran flawlessly, max settings with no AA and my FPS never went below 100 except for in the menus. All gameplay was between 100 and 200 fps. How can these numbers for AMD cards be so low?
The benchmarks are run with TSSAA (x8) which is much more demanding than using no AA.
Yes but the Ultra defaults are not as high as the maximum settings i used. Ultra defaults used quite a few High/Medium settings.
LOL.. I have a 290X and Doom Vulkan is with ultra/TSSAA x8 never goes below 120fps and his 200fps. I will record video of this.
290x is the better card, im totally not surprised that it runs that well with AA on, im pretty sure mine would still be around 80-100 with AA on, i just dont need it to enjoy the game, and like with other fast paced shooters, more FPS is better 😀
WoW the 1060 beat the R9 nano just wow.
Nice analysis! Basically it falls in line with what other sites have shown which is AMD cards showing a huge boost while Nvidia cards show a smaller or no boost at all. Since the crashes in Doom are finally fixed I’ve been able to actually play it more on my 1080. I have to say that OpenGL is the better option for my system. With Vulkan I noticed a few areas got a pretty big fps boost but other areas showed a performance decrease when compared to OpenGL. Also, Vulkan has terrible frame-pacing on my PC which causes a constant stutter at the bottom of the screen while moving forward. It’s a deal breaker. Not sure if Vulkan doesn’t play well with G-Sync but it clearly needs work on the Nvidia side. If they can fix the bad stuttering with Vulkan and fix the areas of the game where Vulkan performs worse than OpenGL then it would be perfect. Then if they could get Async Compute working on Pascal cards on top of that I could see the 1080 showing a larger increase in benchmarks. Then again we don’t know if Async will help Pascal cards in all games. We’ll just have to wait and see.
This video might be some help with configuring PresentMon and calculating min/max/ave figures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=7POz3wUtFYw
Amd’s future looks bright with Vulkan and DX12.
dx12?!! the only way DX12 will matter now is if microsoft stops holding it hostage on a windows 10!
Meh Nvdia is still the winner even if they do not benefit that much from those API’s
AMD wins only with a small minority of games
Great analysis. I dont understand one thing, though:
I have a 1070 GPU with a OCed 2500K CPU and get almost constant 120FPS on Ultra @1440p with Vulkan enabled. Your benchmarks are lower than that.
Cheers
I think for Vulkan you should have the RX 400 series graphics cards from AMD for best performance. RX 480 is the perfect choice.
Nvidia has better high end gpus right now both 1070 and 1080 reign supreme with most games
AMD desperately needs Vega…
Excellent analysis. Love your information, it helped me.