When was the last time you played GZDoom? It is now more performant than LZDoom with the same settings, 20% higher fps in my case.
Zandronum only supports OpenGL and is totally outdated. It may run faster, but so does most every older type port.
A few months ago, when the KF Doom wad got released, but that got me thinking, over the years i've acumulated a bunch of old versions of different source ports, so i made a very quick and dirty benchmark of the initial room of MAP01 across a bunch of versions of GZDoom, going from 1.8.10 to the latest version 4.14.12 (also included Zandronum 3.1 and a couple of versions of LZDoom), yes i know this is not the most scientific way to compare things, and doing this makes me want to do a proper full autism comparison with FPS, frametime graphs, testing it with Winter's Fury and a full on stress map (might do it in the future, but i have to learn how to capture the data properly like Digital Foundry), but i wanted to do this quickly to get a basic idea of performance degradation over the years, and the results were interesting.
Notes:
-All of the ports are running on the exact same settings (None (Linear) texture filtering with 16x anisotropic filtering, lights.pk3 loaded, running at windowed 1600x900, more on the resolution later) except a few exceptions, the latest versions of LZDoom and GZDoom removed the Dark mode from the sector light settings, which was the default mode on GZDoom for ages, so the default mode in those versions got used instead, i don't think it should affect performance much, also i didn't used "None (Trilinear)" for the texture filtering settings, since GZD 1.8.10 is so old it only has Trilinear filtering for the regular filtered textures mode.
-The tests were ran on windowed mode to get them done quickly, if i ever do more exhaustive benchmarks in the future, i will run them on fullscreen mode (even if i think the more recent versions of GZD removed the exclusive fullscreen mode and only have borderless fullscreen)
-For some ungodly reason, the latest version of GZD came with a horrid dithered filter enabled as default, had to remove it and benchmark it again because it looks like shit and it could affect the benchmark result.
-Only OpenGL was used for the newer versions of GZDoom that have extra renderers like Vulkan, OpenGL ES, or the new software mode, i know the Vulkan mode specially should make a difference for the people who have hardware that supports it, but i wanted to make this quickly, any future benchmarks i do will include these modes for completeness.
-All of these were ran on the same machine, an i7-4790 with a GTX 1070ti running Windows 10.
But even with this quick and dirty test, you can see how GZDoom's performance has degraded over the years, even when the new visual features aren't being used, curiously both LZDoom versions i tested ran better than the latest version of GZDoom.
-----------------------------------------------
Doomtuber furfag Dwars (best known for making videos about different Doom source ports) made a video about the current situation, it covers Graf's previous spergouts over the years, and
shilling mentioning UZDoom at the end.
480p archive: