AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" Delivers Best Performance On Linux Over Windows 11 - Even With Gaming
Given the powerful integrated GPU with Strix Halo, it was off to some graphics benchmarking to begin this OS battle. To somewhat surprising behavior, Ubuntu 25.04 was delivering much better performance than Windows 11 for both OpenGL and Vulkan with the modern GravityMark graphics benchmark. Much better performance in fact for both operating systems at their defaults, default balanced power mode, etc. This was a very nice showing of AMD RDNA 3.5 graphics on the open-source driver stack compared to Radeon Software on Windows 11.
To much surprise, the Vulkan ray-tracing performance on Mesa 25.0 RADV with Strix Halo came out just ahead of Windows 11! This was quite an achievement as historically the RADV ray-tracing performance has lagged significantly behind the Radeon Software Vulkan driver and similarly the AMDVLK official open-source driver.
Even for 3DMark Wild Life Extreme with its native Linux build was competing very well with Windows 11 out-of-the-box on this laptop that retails for $8k+ USD.
Turning to a few benchmark-friendly games on Steam, even with Steam Play (Proton) at play for running games like Batman on Linux, the performance on Ubuntu 25.04 was superior to that of Windows 11 with this HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop powered by AMD Strix Halo.
With Counter-Strike 2, there was also superior performance out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 25.04 for this premium AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 395 laptop over Windows 11.