About 6 months ago, Croteam updated Serious Sam 3: BFE to support Vulkan and have a built-in benchmark tool. We were able to compare Vulkan and OpenGL but the game’s built-in benchmark tool only outputs the average frame rate. Neither FRAPS nor OCAT are available on Ubuntu MATE so, we asked Croteam last January 2018 if they can patch the game’s built-in benchmark tool in a way that it will log the frame times then save it to .csv file. We got a favorable response and now it’s patched. Thank you, Croteam 🙂

The result below shows why a graph of frame rate over time is more useful than an average frame rate value. Considering only the average frame rate for the whole 60-second benchmark, Vulkan is just 25% faster than OpenGL. But the last 10 seconds of the benchmark show Vulkan is about 60% faster than OpenGL. In addition, the availability of frame time data also enables us to show the 99th percentile frame time data which is a much more useful performance metric than minimum frame rate.

To those who want to do their own tests or replicate our results, watch our tutorial on how to derive the frame rate based from the frame time data. The benchmark .csv files are located at “steamapps/common/Serious Sam Fusion 2017/Temp“. Shown below is the built-in benchmark sequence we used.