Wednesday, June 15th 2022

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

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.
Sources: The Creator (Guru3D Forums), The Creator, Neowin
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36 Comments on AMD Significantly Improves OpenGL Performance in Windows with Upcoming 22H2 Driver

#2
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.
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#3
pavle
At long last and about 20 years too late. :)
Does this improvement work out for all their supported graphics cards or just latest?
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#4
roberto888
So why is the score on the left on OpenGL and the one on the right DirectX? :confused:
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#5
Quicks
roberto888So why is the score on the left on OpenGL and the one on the right DirectX? :confused:
Maybe to show that OpenGL performance is close to Direct X performance now?
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#6
RH92
QuicksMaybe 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 .
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#7
Valantar
RH92To 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.
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#8
Chomiq
So why they were running W8?
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#9
ravenhold
Next improvement should be on Ray tracing calculation. This is where AMD is generation behind Nvidia.
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#10
Camm
ravenholdNext 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.
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#11
Valantar
ChomiqSo why they were running W8?
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.
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#12
ravenhold
CammThat 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.
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#13
Valantar
ravenholdYes, 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.
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#14
roberto888
QuicksMaybe 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.
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#15
jesdals
Show me the driver - then I will judge :D
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#17
Quicks
This driver will be released to public soon? Would like to test this for myself as well.
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#18
Valantar
QuicksThis 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.
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#19
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!
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#20
Valantar
ModEl4That'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.
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#22
mechtech
Waiting for the fine wine meme

lol posted too late
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#23
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.
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#24
Valantar
Lew Zealanda game that a few people play
Lol, understatement of the century? :P
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#25
HisDivineOrder
ModEl4That'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!
It does matter because what happens the next time they have a serious performance degradation that should be fixed rapidly? Are they going to sit on it for a decade then, too? Why would anyone buy a product where the performance is being degraded because the company is not serious about optimizing their driver? Why not buy the company that's had a great OpenGL driver for all the years OpenGL was relevant?

Think of all the cards that came and went with subpar OpenGL performance that didn't have to have it. It's absurd to ignore AMD's lazy way of handling their drivers just because they decided to catch up now. I hope they keep it up, but this is precisely why people say AMD's drivers were inferior. Every time AMD announces that they finally got around to fixing their big problems, it highlights how people saying, "AMD drivers are fine," were in fantasy land.

"Look guys, we finally got around to fixing DX11 performance!"
"Look guys, we finally got around to fixing OpenGL performance!"

I'm glad they finally did it. Congrats. But this is like thanking AMD for allowing people at the end of Ryzen 5000 series to put them into X370/B350 boards as if they were doing everyone a favor when they could have done it two years ago.

"Thanks for the bare minimum," and so late a lot of people that could have benefited, they've long moved on.
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