Poor Vulkan performance on several mini PCs

RaiderBlack

So I’ve been messing around with Dolphin on several different mini PCs.

I’ve tried an older Lenovo Thinkcentre m73 Tiny with an i5 4570T, 16 GB RAM @ 1600 mhz dual channel, Intel HD Graphics 4600. An HP Prodesk G3 800 with an i5 7500T, Intel HD Graphics 630, 16 GB RAM @ 2400 mhz dual channel, and currently a HP Elitedesk 705 G5 with a Ryzen 3400 GE, Vega 11 graphics, 16 GB RAM @ 2933 MHz dual channel.

Thing is that when using the Vulkan backend, I get pretty poor performance. Even on my 705 G5 Elitedesk. I can barely push my PC to render GC games like Metroid Prime 2 @ 720p with Anti aliasing and Vsync on, and hybrid shaders as well as pre cache shaders on. However, each time I switch to OpenGL, I have a significantly better time. With less stutters and overall better frame rate.

Since Vulkan usually requires less system resources to run, I’m wondering why I’m having a better time using OpenGL on dolphin. I’ve tried running windows as well with more or less the same results on Dolphin.

Shouldn’t my PC be able to run the games better with Vulkan?

Atari

Some GPUs are better at running OpenGL on certain OSes than others.

If you try to find a common trend, or a “this should perform better using XXX API”, then you’re probably just going to confuse yourself.

We stick to OpenGL as default for a reason. It’s the more venerable of the APIs. It’s less likely to have drastic performance differences on certain GPUs comparatively.