Now for the exciting part, the data! Below are the results for all four render modes on both the MSI RX 580 and MSI R9 390 graphics cards. This is representative of the current generation and last generation architectures and how they perform for each render path.

As you can see above, AMD still has a long way to go for OpenGL performance and this render mode is by far the worst for the MSI RX 580 graphics card. These results should match for the full Polaris series of graphics cards ranging from RX 5x0 series and the RX 4x0 series of cards. I think the big surprise given AMDs support and lead in the next generation of APIs (Vulkan and DX12), is our Vulkan results. I honestly expected the Vulkan render path to surpass our DirectX 11 performance. Unfortunately, this is not the case and it even provides lower FPS than the default DirectX 9 renderer.

We also want to note the graphics quality per render mode. We noticed that OpenGL provides a worse visual quality even with the same settings specified. It also seems to be missing all shadowing effects.

OpenGL Visual Quality

DirectX 11 Visual Quality

This might be a bug with the driver or just AMD's implementation of OpenGL instructions, but regardless it's visually inferior to the other three render options. Now for the infamously, long living, consumer friendly, Hawaii GPU.

Our MSI R9 390 performed nearly identical to the RX 580 using OpenGL. This is no surprise as it's seriously bottlenecked by the render path and doesn't show well for the GPU power both cards provide. Surprisingly, we see the opposite with Vulkan and DirectX 9 compared to the RX 580. Vulkan provides better numbers with the R9 390 series but still falls short of taking the performance crown. Here we see DirectX 11 renderer taking first place with a 12% lead over Vulkan and a 17% lead over DirectX 9.