Windows 10 Competing Well Against Ubuntu 20.10 On The AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

Of 106 tests run successfully on both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu Linux was in first place for 70% of those tests whether by a slim or wide margin.

Thus looking at the geometric mean for the overall performance is more interesting and actually puts Windows 10 quite close to Ubuntu 20.10. This is quite similar to what we saw out of the recent and similar tests on the Ryzen 9 5900X system that caught us initially by surprise with seeing Zen 3 performing so well on Windows relative to Linux. For this Ryzen 9 5950X system, Ubuntu 20.10 came out ahead by just over 4%.

Granted, this is looking strictly at the out-of-the-box performance on both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.10. It's possible to further tune/optimize both operating systems but especially more so on Linux. As shown earlier this week with Zen 3, Intel's Clear Linux is ~15% faster than Ubuntu 20.10 for showing the uplift there with a highly optimized x86_64 Linux distribution. It would have been fun to see Clear Linux make this article a three way comparison but AMDGPU driver troubles with their kernel blocked those plans. But aside from the raw performance there are also other factors to consider such as software compatibility, the length of the OS support, and other factors.

One of the areas where Windows 10 consistently performed better is when looking at the web browser results with Mozilla Firefox.

The area where Ubuntu 20.10 continued to perform the strongest against Windows was in the threaded CPU-based renderers such as Blender, LuxCore, V-RAY, and IndigoBench.

Across all of the "creator" tests, Ubuntu 20.10 was about 8% faster than Windows 10 on this Ryzen 9 5950X system.

Ubuntu 20.10 also had the upperhand with the performance of Intel oneAPI software components like OIDn and Embree, imaging workloads like WebP and AVIF image encoding, and cryptography benchmarks, among others.

Those wanting to dive in to all 106 benchmarks on each platform can find all of the raw data over on OpenBenchmarking.org. Looking more at this recent shift of more competitive Windows 10 performance against Ubuntu Linux will continue after the holidays while wrapping up further tests.