Ubuntu 21.04 vs. Windows 10 Trade Blows On The AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX / ASUS ROG Strix G15

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 21.04 vs. Windows 10 Trade Blows On The AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX / ASUS ROG Strix G15

While the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX performance is great on Linux once overcoming any laptop support quirks like with the ASUS ROG Strix G15 "AMD Advantage" laptop running into keyboard and WiFi issues on Linux depending upon the kernel version, how does the performance compare to Microsoft Windows 10? Here are some benchmarks of that ROG Strix G15 AMD laptop under Windows 10 as shipped by ASUS against Ubuntu 21.04 when upgraded to the Linux 5.13 stable kernel.

https://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=30386

[Vorpal]

What on earth is going on with zstd and (to a lesser extent) 7-zip? Why would that be so much faster on Windows? After all isn't compression mostly CPU bound (in which case the differences should be minor)? And if it was IO bound shouldn't it favour Linux?

This makes me suspect there is a bug or missing feature with regards to power management, frequency scaling or something of that nature.

[V1tol]

What on earth is going on with zstd and (to a lesser extent) 7-zip?

I wonder what implementation of 7-zip was used in tests. I discovered that p7zip is slower when comparing to official 7-zip.org implementation (even with prebuild binaries).

[CochainComplex]

I always thought that the compression field was in Linux Hand

[Svyatko]

What on earth is going on with zstd and (to a lesser extent) 7-zip? Why would that be so much faster on Windows? After all isn't compression mostly CPU bound (in which case the differences should be minor)? And if it was IO bound shouldn't it favour Linux?

This makes me suspect there is a bug or missing feature with regards to power management, frequency scaling or something of that nature.

IMHO this is due to OpenCL support: AMD with Windows has it, but AMD with Linux - not (for APU & for mobile GPU - both).
And Intel provides support for OpenCL on Linux (AFAIK).

I managed to use OpenCL with builtin Vega graphics (Ryzen 3 3200G). It works (Blender & others), and compression (Ark) runs faster, but hangs when dealing with too big files. P7zip (J7Z) is not using OpenCL (at least in my case).

https://forums.opensuse.org/showthre...62#post3002062

https://forums.opensuse.org/showthre...34#post3004534

ILL installing libdrm-amdgpu package for Raven APU is causing:

1. Firefox hangs sometimes during work.
2. Ark quits if trying to compress files too big in summed volume.

Possibly this is due to wrong video memory volume report for APUs.

Without libdrm-amdgpu GPU is not used by Ark for compression-decompression.
I can select "Unknown AMD GPU" in Blender for OpenCL usage, and it renders pictures, with less heat generation, but slower than with CPU.
So there is no HSA support with Linux + AMD APU (Intel may work).

With ROCm drivers system works with OpenCL load ~6 times slower than with OpenCL drivers from amdgpu-pro: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...gpu-pro-driver

Possibly I can get OpenCL with AMD working (libdrm issue), but I need funding - from community or AMD or somebody else.

[juxuanu]

Or could the compression benchmarks be because in Linux it's not compiled with x86_64-v3?

[Volta]

Ubuntu's governor still messing up the tests?

[birdie]

Benchmarks are great only most people don't run them. People however use laptops to travel and the power socket is not always available.

What about autonomy e.g. when browsing the web, watching youtube, listening to spotify, editing documents and spreadsheets or doing nothing at all? What about thermals?

[WalterCool]

Any reason why Phoronix haven't made any DGPU test of that laptop?

All kind of tests been made against IGPU or CPU only.

[Linuxxx]

Or could the compression benchmarks be because in Linux it's not compiled with x86_64-v3?

So you are saying that Windows already makes use of these better compiler flags?
If so, is this officially documented somewhere by Microsoft?

Hopefully Canonical will also consider offering x86_64-v3 as an option for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...