Earlier this week the crew over at Futuremark released a major update to their API Overhead testing tool, which is built into the larger…
Earlier this week the crew over at Futuremark released a major update to their API Overhead testing tool, which is built into the larger 3DMark testing suite. The API Overhead tool, first rolled out in 2015 , is a relatively straightforward test that throws increasingly large number of draw calls at a system to see how many calls a system can sustain. The primary purpose of the tool is to show off the vast improvement in draw call performance afforded by modern, low-level APIs that can efficiently spread their work over multiple threads, as opposed to classic APIs like DirectX 11 which are essentially single-threaded and have a high degree of overhead within that sole thread.
The latest iteration of the API Overhead test, now up to version 1.5, has added support for Vulkan, making it one of the first feature-level benchmarks to add support for the API. Khronos’s take on a low-level API – and a decedent of sorts of Mantle – Vulkan has been available now for just a bit over a year. However outside of a very successful outing with Doom , in the PC ream it has been flying somewhat under the radar, as few other games have (meaningfully) implemented support for the API thus far. By the end of 2017 we should be seeing some wider support for the API, but for the moment it’s still in the process of finding its footing among PC developers.
In any case, like OpenGL versus Direct3D 9/10/11 before it, there’s a lot of curiosity (and arguments) over which API is better. Now that Futuremark is supporting the API for their Overhead test, let’s take a quick look at how the two APIs compare here, and whether one API offers lower overhead than the other.
As a reminder for the API Overhead test, this is not a cross-system test or even a cross-GPU test.
