Futuremark has just updated its 3DMark benchmarking suite and this new build adds Vulkan support. There is now an API Overhead feature test to compare Vulkan, DirectX 12, and DirectX 11. The Vulkan test requires compatible video drivers with Vulkan support. The new update also brings some additional fixes and improvements.


With the new update API Overhead can now be tested using Vulkan. In the past Futuremark was using Mantle. In the end you can now compare the performance differences in using the Vulkan, the DirectX 12 as well as the DirectX 11 API. Vulkan is a new graphics API which is supposed to be highly efficient. APIs like Vulkan and DirectX 12 should help programmers to optimize their code for multi-core CPUs and apart from that it should generally help to streamline code and kill software bottlenecks.

The API Overhead test runs a simple scene with a gigantic number of polygons. The test increases the number of polygons until performance drops below 30 frames per second. Once that is done, 3DMark saves the performance and moves on to the next API. Futuremark features single-threaded and multi-threaded modes for DirectX 11, while on DirectX 12 and Vulkan you can select only the multi-thread test. We have never used this kind of benchmark however we decided to do a quick run with all the three APIs.

I have tested my own system that is equipped with a Intel Core i7-5820K processor at stock frequency and an EVGA GTX 980 Ti SuperClocked+ ACX 2.0+ graphics card. According to the tests I conducted Vulkan score 22.6 million draw calls per second, while DirectX 12 scored 20.6 million. Both results are in a completely different league than DirectX 11 which was capable of reaching 1.83 million draw calls per second using the multi-threaded routing and 1.4 million draw calls per second running single-threaded. Following you can find all the details about my run:




Source: 3DMark