Quality Settings Performance
Now that we have looked at how each AMD video card and NVIDIA video card compares in Vulkan versus DX11, let’s focus on one video card, but see how the game’s quality settings compare. In the graphs below we are taking the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT and then the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 FE and running the cards at every game quality preset in Vulkan and DX11. We are comparing “Ultimate” to “Ultra” to “Very High” to “High” to “Medium” to “Low” at Vulkan and DX11.
AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT
Naturally “Ultimate” eats up the most performance at 1440p, while “Low” is the fastest. We see a very natural linear progression of performance from quality setting to quality setting. It’s a nice even change in performance, with no one setting having a very big abrupt change. They seem to scale well.
We also see another pattern, it’s clear that as the quality settings decrease in image quality the performance difference Vulkan has over DX11 grows larger. This makes perfect sense though because the lower the graphics setting, the more CPU dependent the game. Vulkan is supposed to reduce this CPU dependency, and it seems that it is doing a really fantastic job at it. It’s working as intended and really shows up in those lower settings giving us tremendous performance.
On the Radeon RX 5700 XT this game is playable at 1440p at “Ultimate” settings (the highest settings) under Vulkan. Dropping to “Very High” gives you near 100FPS in Vulkan.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 FE
With the GeForce RTX 2080 FE we see the same nice pattern of linear progression between quality settings. The scaling between each quality setting is really nice, there are no abrupt changes.
We also see the same pattern where lower settings have a wider margin in Vulkan versus DX11 compared to the higher settings. However, on the NVIDIA GPUs, the differences in performance aren’t as big at the lower quality settings as they are on the AMD GPUs. Just looking at the overall picture it seems like the AMD GPUs are getting a bigger boost at the low-end settings compared to NVIDIA, and the AMD GPUs are more bottlenecked at the high-end settings with less of an advantage with Vulkan.
This game is very playable on the GeForce RTX 2080 FE at 1440p at “Ultimate” settings in Vulkan. To reach near 100FPS all you have to do is drop one graphics setting to “Ultra” preset.