I figured it'd come up, so I thought I'd get ahead of it. But Crysis preceded Vulkan by about 8 years, so it's not
remotely relevant.
However, it
does give me a chance to share some pertinent details about the Pi's GPU. So, let's compare it with the consoles and high-end cards at the end of 2007, and with entry-level PC iGPUs and dGPUs, available today.
As there seem to be no theoretical specs published for the Pi, I've done the best with what I could find. Also, in an effort to be fair, I've used base clocks for compute performance. Finally, for consoles and iGPUs, I'm only looking at the theoretical performance of the graphics portion.
Make | Model | Introduced | MSRP | GFLOPS | GB/sec |
---|
Pi | v4 (2GB) | 2019-06 | $35 | 32 | 4.4 |
Sony | PS3 | 2006-11 | $500 | 251 | 22.4 |
Microsoft | XBox 360 | 2005-11 | $400 | 240 | 22.4 |
Nvidia | 8800 GT | 2007-10 | $200 | 336 | 57.6 |
AMD | HD 3870 | 2007-11 | $220 | 497 | 57.6 |
Nvidia | GT 1030 | 2017-05 | $70 | 942 | 48.0 |
AMD | RX 550 | 2017-04 | $80 | 1126 | 112.0 |
Intel | HD 630 | 2017 | $64 | 441 | 38.4 |
AMD | RX Vega 8 | 2019-07 | $100 | 1280 | 46.9 |
Hopefully, this will establish some realistic expectations. Put plainly:
the availability of Vulkan support will not magically transform the Pi into a console-class gaming machine. Not even on par with consoles of the Crysis era. Not even close.
References:
- https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=244519&start=50
- https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/raspberry-pi-4-specs-benchmarks
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_technical_specifications
- https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/RSX
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_specifications
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_graphics_processing_units
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_accelerated_processing_units