Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 24.04 Linux Performance For The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X
With all of my AMD Ryzen 9900X and 9950X Linux benchmarking and Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X reviews as well, many have wondered if AMD Zen 5 is just really great on Linux, if Windows 11 is in particularly poor shape for these new AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors, if it's just the different/diverse benchmarks being run, or simply why are these new desktop CPUs running so well on Linux but less so with Windows?
Today's AMD Ryzen 9000 series testing is looking at the Windows 11 versus Linux performance for a few dozen benchmarks that are of similar quality and native to both Windows and Linux in seeing if one operating system is particularly better suited or not than the other. And to help determine if it's a Zen 5 specific problem to one OS or the other OS is better tailored for the very latest AMD Zen 5 processors, the prior generation Ryzen 9 7950X was also tested alongside the Ryzen 9 9950X.
The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 9 9950X were re-tested on the same exact system after carrying out a clean install of Microsoft Windows 11 Professional with all stable updates applied and then repeating the tests on the same hardware after carrying out a clean install of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with all of its stable release updates applied. Thus a look at Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux out-of-the-box on the Ryzen 9 7950X (Zen 4) and Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) systems with 73 benchmarks.
The processors were running on an ASUS ROG STRIX Z670-E GAMING WIFI motherboard with newest 2204 BIOS, 2 x 16GB DDR5-6000 memory, WD_BLACK SN850X 2TB NVMe SSD, Radeon RX 7900 GRE, and a Cooler Master AIO liquid AIO liquid cooling setup each time. Differences in the system table below just come down to slight differences in how the various APIs expose the hardware/software information under each operating system.
A variety of 73 different mostly productive workloads were used and relying mostly on tests that offer official binaries for both Windows and Linux systems to rule out compiler differences. Similarly, gaming workloads were not explored in this article due to focusing just on the CPU performance today in wanting to rule out graphics driver / API differences between Windows and Linux for really trying to isolate if AMD Zen 4 vs. Zen 5 is better on Windows or Linux.
So let's take a look at how I am seeing Windows 11 running on the Ryzen 9 9950X (and 7950X) with my productivity-minded tests against Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.