AMD Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X Linux Gaming Performance
After just publishing the results of 200+ Linux benchmarks under many diverse workloads for the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X we see the 16~20% performance lift is very real and very broad from obscure open-source niche software through high profile programs... What about the Linux gaming performance? This article offers a first look at the Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X Linux gaming performance compared to Zen 2 and the Core i9 10900K while being the first of several Linux gaming performance articles coming out this month.
This article is intended to offer a first-look at the Linux gaming performance with the Ryzen 5900 series while further tests are forthcoming. For this comparison was the Intel Core i9 10900K up against the Ryzen 9 3900XT, Ryzen 9 3950X, Ryzen 9 5900X, and Ryzen 9 5950X at stock speeds and 2 x 8GB DDR4-3600 memory throughout.
The graphics card for this comparison was the Radeon RX 5700 XT given the popularity of AMD's open-source driver stack with Linux gamers and also being compatible with the Linux 5.9 kernel used throughout testing unlike NVIDIA's current woes with the current latest stable kernel series. But in any case Zen 3 + NVIDIA RTX 30 and AMD Radeon RX 6000 series will both be coming soon as well for an even more interesting comparison. Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS was running on the system as with the other tests published this morning for launch day. All CPUs were at their default speeds without overclocking.
But to get straight to it: the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X dominate over the Core i9 10900K for Linux gaming! The Core i9 10900K Comet Lake processor previously had the upper-hand over the Ryen 9 3900XT and Ryzen 9 5950X for Linux gaming but that is no longer the case. This geometric mean is based on all the gaming tests conducted so far and about to be shown in more detail in this article. But for this high-level look, going from the Ryzen 9 3900XT to Ryzen 9 5900X was indeed ~21% higher performance. This put the Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X at about 5% higher frame-rates than the Core i9 10900K while also leading in the 200+ other non-gaming benchmarks shown in the other article.