Evaluating the Performance and Energy Efficiency of OpenGL and Vulkan on a Graphics Rendering Server

Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) has been the de facto industry standard of 2D and 3D graphics rendering for decades. As OpenGL continued to evolve, it becomes easier to use and more powerful by accommodating heterogeneous hardware and hiding optimization details from developers. As a side effect, its overhead gradually increases and its performance becomes unpredictable. To address the weaknesses of OpenGL, Vulkan was proposed as a thin graphics API to reduce the overhead and allow developers to gain grainer control over rendering process. This paper conducts a comprehensive evaluation on the performance and energy efficiency of OpenGL and Vulkan on a graphics rendering server. Our experimental results show that 1) OpenGL’s performance is unpredictable; 2) Vulkan can save significant amount of energy while maintaining the same performance; and 3) OpenGL cannot keep up with Vulkan’s performance when an extremely high frame rate is required.