AMD Radeon 680M Graphics Benchmarks Across Various Linux Kernel, Mesa Versions

With the Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" mobile processors most exciting about these Zen 3+ SoCs has been the energy efficiency improvements and moving from Vega to RDNA2 graphics as with the Radeon 680M found on the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U that I have been running many Linux benchmarks on over the past several weeks. For those wondering if it pays off moving to a newer Linux kernel or Mesa version with Radeon 680M integrated graphics, here are some reference benchmarks I recently conducted.

The AMD Radeon 680M (RDNA2) graphics are a great upgrade over the long-used GFX9/Vega hardware with AMD's APUs. I continue to be quite impressed with the graphics and the performance-per-Watt from my ongoing Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U testing using the Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen3.

Recently I carried out some reference benchmarks of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS stock and then various Linux kernel and Mesa upgrades for those wondering if it pays off moving to some newer packages.

The short answer is, even the stock Ubuntu 22.04 LTS stack is good enough for most benchmarks but there are a few exceptions. It's worth pointing out that Ubuntu 22.04's default kernel uses amd-pstate now for the newer AMD SoCs rather than ACPI CPUFreq, which is still the mainline default.

In the case of GravityMark, the Linux 5.15 kernel was performing slightly faster but may be due to Ubuntu 22.04's stock kernel using amd-pstate on this system -- but I have a CPUFreq vs. P-State comparison coming up shortly.



For most benchmarks there wasn't too much of a difference across the tested Linux kernel and Mesa versions.

The newer kernel did help out in some benchmarks by a small amount.









YQuake2 was showing regressions on newer Mesa, similar to yquake2 regressing in these recent Radeon RX 6700/6800 XT benchmarks but this Quake II derived game already runs very fast on almost any modern hardware...






With rare exceptions, even running the stock Ubuntu 22.04 LTS packages of Mesa 22.0 and Linux 5.15 is good enough for the Radeon 680M graphics with AMD Rembrandt SoCs that Linux users don't need to jump through extra hoops to enjoy these new AMD APU graphics with great speed. Those wanting to see all these reference benchmarks can do so via this result file. In case you missed it, see my earlier Radeon 680M Linux comparison review for seeing how the performance stacks up against other notebooks.