AMD Significantly Improves OpenGL Performance in Windows with Upcoming 22H2 Driver

[btarunr]

AMD for long has been perceived as lagging behind NVIDIA in OpenGL API graphics performance, as is evident in synthetic benchmarks that let you choose between various APIs, such as DirectX 11, DirectX 12, Vulkan, and OpenGL. It's being reported that the company has made a technical breakthrough that could significantly improve OpenGL application performance, bringing Radeon GPUs on par with GeForce in GL applications. Besides a few old games, several productivity applications continue to use OpenGL, such as Adobe Creative Cloud suite; as well as certain 3D renderers.

AMD is incorporating its OpenGL performance enhancement in drivers bound for Windows 11 22H2 (the major release bound for the second half of 2022). With this release, Microsoft is debuting WDDM 3.1, and AMD is already out with a Preview driver meant for Windows Insiders, bearing version 31.0.12000.20010. A quick Unigine Valley benchmark run with the OpenGL renderer reveals an incredible 49.5% increase in frame-rates, bringing the RX 6800 XT sample to performance-levels you'd expect from the RTX 3080. An identical 49.5% frame-rate increase was seen in Unigine Superposition.



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[cyberloner]

evolving again.......

 

[Ferrum Master]

Tbh AMD's OpenGL performance was so notoriously bad and it was a known thing for years... obviously they had a massive area to improve on.

 

[pavle]

At long last and about 20 years too late.
Does this improvement work out for all their supported graphics cards or just latest?

 

[roberto888]

So why is the score on the left on OpenGL and the one on the right DirectX?

 

[Quicks]

So why is the score on the left on OpenGL and the one on the right DirectX?

Maybe to show that OpenGL performance is close to Direct X performance now?

 

[RH92]

Maybe to show that OpenGL performance is close to Direct X performance now?

To make that comparison you have to show the gap prior to these new drivers .

 

[Valantar]

To make that comparison you have to show the gap prior to these new drivers .

Seems like they're assuming that previous DX/OGL performance differences are well known, and are demonstrating (rough) performance parity between APIs rather than a before/after comparison.

 

[Chomiq]

So why they were running W8?

 

[ravenhold]

Next improvement should be on Ray tracing calculation. This is where AMD is generation behind Nvidia.

 

[Camm]

Next improvement should be on Ray tracing calculation.

That is less of a driver issue, and more of a combination between hardware approach (there are simply less resources dedicated to RT on AMD cards) & devs optimising for Nvidia and not AMD. The second one is interesting, some devs have seen increases of around 20% in RT just through optimisation.

 

[Valantar]

So why they were running W8?
View attachment 251079

It's most likely Valley that misidentifies anything newer than W8 as W8.


As for a "before" comparison, here's some quick Superposition results with the current driver, 1080p Extreme preset. A few caveats: this was a single run of each, run with all my normal background applications running, so very un-optimized and with the potential for either run being an outlier. The DX run was also run first, giving it a marginal boost advantage due to thermals - but the differences were marginal at most (temperature/clock monitoring data).

DX:

OpenGL:

That's a 24% advantage for DX (or OpenGL is 20% slower, depending on how you look at it). If this new driver brings these to parity, that's impressive.

 

[ravenhold]

That is less of a driver issue, and more of a combination between hardware approach (there are simply less resources dedicated to RT on AMD cards) & devs optimising for Nvidia and not AMD. The second one is interesting, some devs have seen increases of around 20% in RT just through optimisation.

Yes, some games only have Nvidia RTX like Control and I wonder if AMD could optimize driver and improve FSR 3 to combine it with Ray tracing.

 

[Valantar]

Yes, some games only have Nvidia RTX like Control and I wonder if AMD could optimize driver and improve FSR 3 to combine it with Ray tracing.

Nvidia RTX is just DXR running on an Nvidia GPU - but the branding mainly means that Nvidia helped some in developing the game. As for upscaling, using it in combination with RT is definitely a key use for it - but it remains to be seen whether there are specific ways of combining the two that can deliver more benefits than what we're currently seeing.

 

[roberto888]

Maybe to show that OpenGL performance is close to Direct X performance now?

I think they just had the wrong pictures edited.

Here are the ones from OC3D:

That's how it should be, and this looks like a decent uplift.

 

[jesdals]

Show me the driver - then I will judge

 

[mama]

Just WOW!

 

[Quicks]

This driver will be released to public soon? Would like to test this for myself as well.

 

[Valantar]

This driver will be released to public soon? Would like to test this for myself as well.

The post says it's meant to be released alongside the Windows 11 22H2 update. That update is rumored to arrive arond September-October.

 

[ModEl4]

That's very good news, it doesn't matter if it's 10 years or whatever late, it shows the good work that the AMD's s/w engineers are doing and how they're evolving their game!

 

[Valantar]

That's very good news, it doesn't matter if it's 10 years or whatever late, it shows the good work that the AMD's s/w engineers are doing and how they're evolving their game!

If one wants to be optimistic, it's pretty easy to see this as a sign of AMD increasing their driver/software development spending as their revenue has increased. Hopefully that's what we're seeing.

 

[Makaveli]

 

[mechtech]

Waiting for the fine wine meme

lol posted too late

 

[Lew Zealand]

Minecraft Java, which is a game that a few people play, uses OGL for the display engine and this should be a great help as MC is noticeably faster on Nvidia GPUs compared to similar speed AMD GPUs. ie: GTX 1080 vs. RX 5600XT.

 

[Valantar]

a game that a few people play

Lol, understatement of the century?