Radeon Gaming/Graphics Performance: Windows 11 vs. Linux GPU Benchmarks
With the end of the year upon us it's a great time to see how the Windows vs. Linux gaming performance is looking as we enter 2023. In particular, it's interesting on the AMD Radeon side with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack having made great gains this year thanks to the continued investment by AMD and heavy contributions by Valve to the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver that is used by the Steam Deck and commonly in general by Linux gamers. Here is a look at the Windows vs. Linux GPU performance both for the mature RDNA2 support as well as the recently-released RDNA3 graphics.
This end-of-year benchmarking is looking at the Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux performance for the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards for both a mature and modern look at the AMD Radeon Linux driver support on Linux and Windows. A variety of games were benchmarked -- primarily games that run well on Linux via Steam Play -- as well as other graphics benchmarks for seeing how the performance is looking. Similar articles are coming in the days ahead carrying out benchmarks on Intel Arc Graphics and NVIDIA GeForce hardware as well for looking at the landscape as we enter 2023.
The Windows 11 testing was done using Windows 11 Pro with all updates as of this week. The Radeon RX 6800 XT was tested using the Adrenalin 22.11.2 Recommended (WHQL) driver as the latest for that Navi 2 GPU. The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX on Windows was using the Adrenalin 22.12.2 for Radeon RX 7900 Series (WHQL) as the latest RDNA3 graphics driver there as released last week.
Over on the Linux side, Linux 6.2-rc1 and Mesa 23.0-devel were in use as the very latest open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver support atop Ubuntu 22.10. This Linux 6.2 + Mesa 23.0 testing offers a look at the very bleeding-edge Linux graphics capabilities for the AMD RDNA2 and RDNA3 graphics hardware.
All of this testing was carried out on the same Intel Core i9 13900K "Raptor Lake" system at stock speeds with 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory, ASUS PRIME Z790-P WIFI motherboard, Solidigm P44 PRO 2TB NVMe SSD, and the reference RX 6800 XT and RX 7900 XTX graphics cards. From there a variety of different games and GPU benchmarks were conducted.