Ubuntu 26.04 Delivers Great Performance Improvements For AMD Strix Point, Especially For RDNA 3.5 Graphics
The Cryptsetup benchmark for evaluating the system's cryptography performance was showing some nice wins out of the upgrade to Linux 7.0. Good for those making use of disk encryption on your Ryzen AI laptop.
I was surprised at first to see Blender 5.1 performing worse on Ubuntu 26.04 than Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS when using the same official binaries. But under Ubuntu 26.04 the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 power consumption was consistently lower that ended up making for more efficient performance on this AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 ASUS laptop.
Overall, Ubuntu 26.04 was showing some nice performance gains over Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS on this AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 ASUS Zenbook laptop.
When taking the geometric mean of more than 100 benchmarks, Ubuntu 26.04 came out to being 1.18x the performance of the current Ubuntu LTS release with the HWE stack from Ubuntu 25.10. Helping out the geo mean a lot was the strong AMD Radeon 890M graphics performance improvements found for both OpenGL and Vulkan on Ubuntu 26.04.
If 1.18x the performance from an OS upgrade wasn't exciting enough, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 power consumption over the entire span of testing was also lower on Ubuntu 26.04. On Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS the power consumption average was 24.39 Watts while on Ubuntu 26.04 was at 23.08 Watts.
Ubuntu 26.04 is performing well not only on Strix Point but all of the AMD Zen 5 laptop / desktop / server hardware I have tested thus far.
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