Ubuntu 19.10 To 21.10: AMD Zen 2 + Radeon Performance On Linux Over Two Years

With Ubuntu 21.10 due for release this week I've been running various Ubuntu Linux performance comparisons across a variety of hardware and overall this new release is looking to be in great shape. One of the tests I recently carried out for curiosity is seeing how the AMD Zen 2 performance has evolved now over the past two years on Linux going from Ubuntu 19.10 to Ubuntu 21.10.

Ubuntu 19.10 was the first release following the Zen 2 debut in the summer of 2019. The benchmarks today are looking at the Ubuntu 19.10 performance up against the Ubuntu 21.10 daily ISO in its near final form ahead of the official release on Thursday.

The system used for this Ubuntu 19.10 vs. 21.10 testing was an AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT with MSI MEG X570 GODLIKE motherboard, 2 x 8GB DDR4-3600 memory, 500GB Seagate FireCuda 520 NVMe SSD, and AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics.

Going from Ubuntu 19.10 to 21.10 means jumping from Linux 5.3 to Linux 5.13, GNOME Shell 3.34 to GNOME Shell 40, Wayland by default fo the GNOME session, Mesa 19.2 to Mesa 21.2, and GCC 9.2 to GCC 11.2, among many other updated software components over the past two years. This AMD Zen 2 / 3900XT testing was done out-of-the-box on both Ubuntu Linux releases from this same system.