Linux 5.8 Bringing Some Performance Boosts For AMD Renoir Graphics

Over the weekend I began running some benchmarks of the Linux 5.8 development kernel on the Lenovo Flex 5 laptop with Ryzen 5 4500U. One of the standouts so far for from this Linux 5.8 testing compared to the stable 5.6/5.7 kernel series is better Radeon graphics performance with the Renoir laptop.

Tests were done from this quite capable six-core ~$600 AMD laptop.

When running nearly 100 benchmarks on Linux 5.6 / 5.7 / 5.8 Git from the Ryzen 5 4500U laptop, the performance overall was quite close:

But when digging into all of the results, where Linux 5.8 was providing a visible advantage was in many of the graphics tests in offering better performance:






In other areas of performance, the Linux 5.8 kernel didn't equate to any meaningful changes either way for this Ryzen 5 4500U. Those interested in all of the data anyhow can find them on OpenBenchmarking.org. To the negative the only issue encountered on Linux 5.8 has been Google Chrome crashing with this new kernel, but presumably will be worked out in time for the release and an issue others have been encountering too and not specific to Renoir.

Additional Linux 5.8 tests including on more Radeon graphics configurations will be coming up soon to see if this is part of broad AMD Radeon graphics gains or specific to these latest Vega-based mobile graphics.