Early Ubuntu 21.10 Performance Is Looking Good - Especially For Radeon Graphics

While there is still two months to go until the Ubuntu 21.10 "Impish Indri" release, since the feature freeze has now begun I've started some early testing of this next Ubuntu release. So far things are looking good as a nice upgrade over Ubuntu 21.04 and prior. Here is the first round of Ubuntu 21.04 vs. 21.10 development tests using an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X with Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics.

Ubuntu 21.10 as of testing was making use of the Linux 5.13 kernel, GNOME Shell 40.2 with the Wayland session still the default, Mesa 21.1.4, and GCC 11.2, among many other package upgrades. This is a nice incremental update over Ubuntu 21.04 from earlier this year especially with now having GCC 11 and every newer kernel step forward is always appreciated. Hopefully still as feature freeze exceptions we'll see use of the Linux 5.14 kernel and Mesa 21.2. Those are two upgrades I certainly hope will make it into this release.

As the official Ubuntu 21.10 release in October nears I'll be through with more benchmarks, but already the state is looking quite good with the current package versions. With the Ryzen 9 5950X + Radeon system where I've been carrying out many tests in recent days, the experience has been great. With GCC 11 means having initial AMD Zen 3 (znver3) tuning support, the newer kernel brings a number of improvements, and the newer Mesa means a lot for open-source graphics especially if using Radeon graphics or Intel Gen12/Xe.