Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu 20.10 Performance With Intel Tiger Lake, AMD Renoir
First up was the RealSR-NCNN program that builds atop Tencent's NCNN deep learning framework and making use of Vulkan acceleration for providing real-world super-resolution image upscaling... Basically for these purposes a Vulkan compute test.
For this real-world Vulkan compute use-case, the Vega graphics on RADV with Ubuntu 20.10 were much faster than the Ryzen 5 4500U on Windows with the Radeon Software Vulkan driver. But on Ubuntu 20.10 with Intel Tiger Lake, the Intel ANV Vulkan driver performance was slower than the company's separate Vulkan Windows driver. But at the same time Mesa 20.3-devel continues making a lot of headway so will be interesting to see how the Intel Tiger Lake Vulkan performance compares on Windows and Linux moving forward. In any case fun to see the Radeon RADV performance for this compute test outperform AMD's official Vulkan Windows driver by such wide margins!
Next was the demanding Unigine Heaven OpenGL test case that is of similar quality on Windows/Linux and with NVIDIA's shared code-base driver generally delivers similar performance on both operating systems. In this case the Renoir graphics were about 26% faster on Windows over RadeonSI on Ubuntu 20.10 while Tiger Lake was just about 8% faster on Windows over the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver on Linux. In any case, more Vulkan/OpenGL Tiger Lake comparisons will be coming with Mesa 20.3-devel in a future article given the Intel Linux graphics stack for Gen12 still becoming better optimized.
Interestingly with the FFTE benchmark running FFTs on the CPUs, the Renoir performance was similar between both operating systems as would be expected. But in the case of Tiger Lake the performance is much greater on Linux and that also put it ahead of Renoir rather than behind on Windows.
With a simpler workload of using the BLAKE2 crypto program, the performance was similar across the board.
When looking at WebP image encoding performance using Google's reference library, at the low encode settings Ubuntu 20.10 was faster on both Renoir and Tiger Lake. But with the more demanding image encode settings, the results between Windows and Linux were much tighter and in some cases even.