Windows Subsystem For Linux / WSL2 Performance With The AMD Ryzen 9 5900X

Ultimately though it comes down to the individual workload and especially how much I/O is involved for how well it performs under Windows Subsystem for Linux relative to the bare metal speed, similar to what we have seen out of past comparisons on prior Windows 10 releases.

But WSL2 is certainly improving with better performance -- and in some cases slightly faster than Ubuntu due to power management handling differences and other factors between platforms. We will also be revisiting the WSL2 GPU performance as that support further matures and areas like Radeon Open Compute begin to work with RDNA2.

Of 43 benchmarks run under all four configurations, WSL1 was delivering just 65% the performance of Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS overall but now with WSL2 it's up to 93% after closing the gaps in a number of benchmarks with much higher I/O throughput.