Windows 10 Competing Well Against Ubuntu 20.10 On The AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

Earlier this month we were a bit surprised to see Windows 10 performing close to Ubuntu 20.10 on the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X. With prior AMD Ryzen (and Intel Core) desktop CPUs we normally are used to seeing Ubuntu Linux exhibit healthy performance advantages over Windows 10 in most workloads. But with Zen 3 the Windows vs. Linux performance is much closer and thus led us to also running Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu benchmarks on the higher-end Ryzen 9 5950X to reproduce the earlier findings.

With the separate system and with the Ryzen 9 5950X having four more cores (and eight thread) advantage over the 5900X, curiosity led to see if Microsoft Windows 10 was still competing well with Ubuntu where as normally on the higher-end desktop CPUs is where Linux generally shines much better. Overall it was on this system with Windows 10 coming up closer to the performance level offered by Ubuntu 20.10 on the same system.

This latest Windows vs. Linux comparison was done with the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X at stock speeds, an ASUS CROSSHAIR VIII HERO WiFi motherboard with its latest BIOS, 2 x 8GB Corsair DDR4-3600 memory, a 1TB Corsair Force MP600 PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid-state drive, and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics. The same system and same BIOS configuration was obviously preserved across testing both on Windows and Linux. Ubuntu 20.10 and Windows 10 Pro H2'2020 had all available system updates installed as of testing.

Ubuntu 20.10 was used given its popularity and leading when it comes to Linux desktop usage. As shown in the other tests this week, Intel's Clear Linux can still deliver ~15% uplift over Ubuntu and other distributions. Originally the plan was to also include Clear Linux on this Ryzen 9 5950X OS comparison but the latest Clear Linux releases were having kernel issues with the AMDGPU driver. Thus for now at least it's just the Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu comparison as we usually do. As shown in the prior article as well, between Ubuntu 20.10 and the likes of the Arch-based Manjaro and Debian testing there isn't much of a difference for most workloads.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite over 100 benchmarks were run on this Windows 10 and Linux testing.