Ubuntu 26.04 Showing Nice Gains Over Ubuntu 25.10 On AMD Ryzen 9000 Series
With the NVIDIA R590 graphics driver for the GeForce RTX 5080 graphics available on both Ubuntu 25.10 and 26.04, the graphics performance is typically unchanged in this comparison. If using AMD Radeon or Intel graphics and upgrading to Ubuntu 26.04, you are more likely to see performance benefits thanks to the Mesa and Linux kernel version upgrades. But when it comes to the standalone packaged NVIDIA driver, it makes the GeFoece RTX 50 Blackwell testing less interesting here.
In a few graphics/gaming benchmarks there were performance benefits to using Ubuntu 26.04, potentially due to the Linux 7.0 kernel improvements and/or the updated GNOME 50 desktop with the latest Mutter Wayland compositor having enhancements.
For heavy CPU workloads like video encoding, there were some small performance benefits to running on Ubuntu 26.04. With both Ubuntu 25.10 and 26.04 using the GCC 15.2 compiler by default, there isn't any big compiler upgrade to really drive any performance changes there.
For being a six-month comparison and the AMD Zen 5 Linux platform support being mature for quite a while now, seeing more evolutionary performance improvements is still need to see on this AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop.