Is it true that OPENGL ES 3.1 is slower than OPENGL ES 2.0?

Question

Found an article here OpenGL ES versus Vulkan, who is the performance king? mentioned that:

"The problem with OpenGL ES 3.1 is that while the graphics look immensely better than OpenGL ES 2.0, the performance hit is so great that games are basically not playable, looking at the image above comparing OpenGL ES 2.0 and 3.1 on my Nexus 6P shows that the exact same scene runs at a third of the frames per second compared to OpenGL ES 2.0. This is where Vulkan comes in, offering at least the same in graphics quality, but with improved performance. So how does Vulkan do?"

I can't imagine that 3.1 slower than 2.0 with the same scene. Had the author mistaken the image? Seems the right image have GI.

Answer 1

I took a look at this article also while searching the same question myself, and please note that in it the author used unreal to do the comparisons. Enabling different options in unreal such as gl es 3 doesnt only change the gl version but also adds more realism that the engine assumes that gl es 3 can handle.