Not many games take full advantage of the performance enhancements offered by the Vulkan API, but for those that do, AMD cards pull well ahead of their Nvidia competition. A great example of that is the recently released World War Z zombie-shooter co-op title. In some early testing conducted by GameGPU, it found that the best cards to play it on are AMD cards — and by quite some margin. The Vega 56 achieves similar frame rates to that of the Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti — a card almost four times the price.
The test in question which saw such disparate performance numbers between the red and green team was run at 1080p at ultra settings, with an Intel Core i9 9900K running at 5.2GHz. That resolution allowed the Vulkan API's draw-cell enhancements to really boost the CPU's capabilities and allowed AMD cards to shine. The Radeon VII was able to achieve an average frame rate of almost 200, with an average over 160. In comparison, the 2080 Ti averaged 160, less than the Vega 64 and only a couple of frames more than the Vega 56.
At 1440p the frame rates fall, but the placement of AMD and Nvidia cards doesn't. The Vega 64 and Radeon VII are still the most capable, although the 2080 Ti does close the gap enough to match the 64's performance. The Vega 56 still outstrips the RTX 2080 and 1080 Ti by a small margin. Even the RX 590 beats out the RTX 2070, a card more than twice its cost.
At 4k Nvidia cards catch up, but Vulkan is less useful at that resolution due to a heavier reliance on the GPU. Only at that resolution does the 2080 Ti get back on top, but only slightly. The Radeon VII and Vega 64 are hot on its heels (and interestingly enough, almost identical to one another), while the Vega 56 and 2080 go head to head with near 60 FPS averages.
All of this shows promise for the Vulkan API and has us cautiously excited by what AMD can do with its upcoming Navi graphics cards.
