Benchmarking Vulkan vs OpenGL Rendering on Low-Power Edge GPUs

Abstract

With the ever-increasing demand for virtualizing every aspect of life, engineers design solutions to create immersion in virtual and augmented reality scenarios. Most virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets require a connection to a computing system and thus they demand the acquisition of additional hardware to use the headsets. Following Moore's law, transistors have become smaller and computers more powerful. As a result, new hardware and programming languages have been developed to achieve high-performance graphics while requiring low power. This paper compares OpenGL and Vulkan implementations on Nvidia's Jetson development kits equipped with edge GPUs that can generate 3D graphics under 5W (Jetson Nano), 15W (Jetson TX2) and, 30W (Jetson Xavier), providing an in-house processing and cost-effective headset solution without an external processing unit. We report that efficiency can be 2 times higher than desktop graphics processing units (GPUs) while maintaining a reasonable amount of rendering power.