Windows 11 vs. Linux Gaming Performance On The ASUS ROG Ally

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Windows 11 vs. Linux Gaming Performance On The ASUS ROG Ally

Many readers have been curious about the performance of Linux gaming on the ASUS ROG Ally gaming handheld that out-of-the-box runs Microsoft Windows 11 Home... Well, the wait is over with the first benchmarks today of Windows 11 against Ubuntu 23.04 Linux on the ROG Ally. Beyond looking at the out-of-the-box performance, the results under Windows 11 with ASUS' "Turbo Mode" is also included plus some modifications to allow Linux to be more competitive to Windows 11 for games.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/rog-ally-windows-linux

[user1]

It seems AMD's new Windows OGL driver is now mostly on par with RadeonSi, which means it's probably a bit faster than Nvidia's OGL driver as well.

[avis]

Linux is within 10% of Windows performance which, considering the use of emulation/translation/whatever you wanna call it, is just amazing.

[superm1]

Something I notice missing is that you haven't set amd_pstate=active on your kernel command line (and then looked at the different results you can get from the EPP performance vs powersave profiles). Windows 11 will be enabling CPPC by default and set EPP targets, which behaves similarly to amd_pstate=active.

[remenic]

They should stop calling it "balanced" mode. It's just a very low performance mode.

[timofonic]

Something I notice missing is that you haven't set amd_pstate=active on your kernel command line (and then looked at the different results you can get from the EPP performance vs powersave profiles). Windows 11 will be enabling CPPC by default and set EPP targets, which behaves similarly to amd_pstate=active.

Should he repeat the tests?

Anyway. I see performance should be better.

Linux still lags behind in hardware support, unfortunately. I dream of Linux hardware support being better and a lot fsster in Linux than Windows, maybe someday.

[Michael]

Something I notice missing is that you haven't set amd_pstate=active on your kernel command line (and then looked at the different results you can get from the EPP performance vs powersave profiles). Windows 11 will be enabling CPPC by default and set EPP targets, which behaves similarly to amd_pstate=active.

Was trying to do defaults as much as possible but do indeed plan to do some P-State comparison benchmarks as a separate article.

[superm1]

Was trying to do defaults as much as possible but do indeed plan to do some P-State comparison benchmarks as a separate article.

Starting with 6.5, amd-pstate=active will be the default

[fahrenheit]

They should stop calling it "balanced" mode. It's just a very low performance mode.

it is balanced, as in, it's the default power usage profile for the cpu. And when playing untethered that will probably be the best you can get unless you wish for your sessions to last around 30 minutes.

On pure performance benchmarks the ally will win over the deck but in untethered I'm guessing they will score similary.

Michael do you plan on running some tests on battery for both the Ally and the deck?

[John-Banister]

I'm glad to hear that it's even possible to use the ROG Ally under Linux. I was frightened that there wouldn't be a driver for the built-in gaming control hardware.