Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance For The AMD Ryzen AI 9 365
First up is a look at some graphics benchmarks of the Radeon 880M graphics found with the Ryzen AI 9 365. In wanting to look at just the launch-day graphics driver support for the RDNA3.5 graphics, this round is using synthetic benchmarks that have known similar OpenGL/Vulkan support across both Windows and Linux. Rather than getting into the Steam Play (Proton) overhead and cross-API translation, in really just wanting to see how the cross-platform graphics driver support is at launch, these were the graphics tests initially run. In a later article I'll likely follow-up with more gaming focused tests.
Right off the start it was refreshing to see the AMD RDNA3.5 graphics on Linux performing competitively to the AMD Windows OpenGL driver. Going back some prior generations, Windows typically carried a measurable advantage on launch day in terms of GPU driver optimizations but at least for RDNA3.5 it's looking in pretty good shape.
In the case of the Unvanquished cross-platform game, Ubuntu 24.04 with Linux 6.10 and Mesa Git was much faster than Windows 11.
With the YQuake2 game and its Vulkan renderer, the Mesa RADV driver with RDNA3.5 graphics tended to be much faster than the official AMD Windows Vulkan driver.
Or in the case of the very GPU-demanding Furmark benchmark, the OpenGL performance was similar between platforms but with the Vulkan API use the Mesa RADV open-source driver was tending to perform much faster than the AMD Windows driver.
It's great seeing the open-source AMD Radeon graphics driver stack on Linux performing very well for launch day and really wasn't expecting the Mesa drivers to pick up any wins ahead of Windows at-launch. Again, more gaming tests with Steam Play and the like to come later.