Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 24.04 Linux Performance For The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 16 August 2024 at 01:00 PM EDT. Page 8 of 8. 106 Comments.
IndigoBench benchmark with settings of Acceleration: CPU, Scene: Bedroom. Ubuntu 24.04: Ryzen 9 9950X was the fastest.
IndigoBench benchmark with settings of Acceleration: CPU, Scene: Supercar. Ubuntu 24.04: Ryzen 9 9950X was the fastest.

With the proprietary Indigo renderer, going from the Ryzen 9 7950X to 9950X on Linux yielded roughly 1% more uplift for both scenes than was the Zen 4 to Zen 5 difference on Windows 11.

Appleseed benchmark with settings of Scene: Emily. Ubuntu 24.04: Ryzen 9 9950X was the fastest.

The Appleseed renderer binaries on each OS showed more uplift for the "Emily" scene with going from the Ryzen 9 7950X to 9950X on Linux than there was with little change under Windows 11 between these two processors.

Appleseed benchmark with settings of Scene: Disney Material. Ubuntu 24.04: Ryzen 9 9950X was the fastest.

But with the Disney Material scene rendered by Appleseed, there was healthy Zen 4 to Zen 5 uplift on each OS.

Chaos Group V-RAY benchmark with settings of Mode: CPU. Ubuntu 24.04: Ryzen 9 9950X was the fastest.

With the proprietary V-RAY application, there was healthy and similar uplift on each operating system when upgrading from the Ryzen 9 7950X to 9950X. However, the Linux performance with each processor was faster than on Windows 11.

Geometric Mean Of All Test Results benchmark with settings of Result Composite, Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux On AMD Ryzen 9 9950X. Ubuntu 24.04: Ryzen 9 9950X was the fastest.

When taking the geometric mean of 73 benchmarks run for this comparison, upgrading from the Ryzen 9 7950X to 9950X on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS yielded a 14% generational improvement with this set of cross-platform applications/benchmarks while under Windows 11 was a 10% generational improvement. The raw performance of Ubuntu Linux on the AMD Ryzen processors also was greater overall to the extent of the Ryzen 9 7950X to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS nearly matching the Ryzen 9 9950X on Microsoft Windows 11.

In some cases like video encoding and some Intel oneAPI packages there were clearly cases of the Zen 5 processor scaling much more on Linux than with Windows. In other applications it was a toss-up. But at least in some areas we did indeed see Linux offering more uplift when going from the Ryzen 9 7950X to 9950X than when testing the same applications under Windows 11. But in any event this is just a small look at things due to my primary focus on Linux performance and many of my other benchmarks not natively supporting Windows, etc. If there is enough interest I may also explore the Zen 5 performance under Windows Subsystem for Linux and other areas. I'll also be looking at the Windows/Linux gaming performance but there it's not as clear-cut given the graphics driver differences, API translation overhead on Linux, etc. There are also other areas on my TODO list to explore such as the Ryzen 9 9950X impact with AMD P-State / CPU frequency scaling governor tuning, exploring Linux distributions with x86_64 micro-architecture feature level builds on Zen 5, and other modifications to try to push the Linux performance further.

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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.