Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 24.04 Linux Performance For The AMD Ryzen 9 9590X | Hacker News Reader

Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 24.04 Linux Performance For The AMD Ryzen 9 9590X

phoronix.com

29 pointsmikece11 comments

If you look at modern games like AC: Valhalla and compare Wine with Windows [1], you'll see that the Linux scheduler is superior, resulting in a much better worst-case performance. (But of course the Wine emulation results in a slightly lower best-case performance.) Or some games that have been tested with Proton by the developers, like Far Cry 6, are just faster on Linux in every case. [2]

It makes me very happy to observe that by now, the best way to consume games targeting the Win32 API might well be to use a Linux host :)

And, of course, AMD is going to optimize their multi-core monsters like the 9590X for Linux usage, because Linux data-center servers are the most lucrative market segment. And the Ryzen 9 7950X3D is very popular as Hetzner's AX102 Dedicated Server, for example. In contrast to Windows, AMD can easily ship scheduler fixes/improvements/patches for Linux [3]. And they certainly optimized for V-Ray, one of the tests where Linux saw a +10% lead, because Linux-based AMD render farms are widely used in the industry. (One of V-Ray's selling points is that you can export from a Windows + 3ds workstation into their proprietary file format and then render on headless Linux nodes. Windows licenses are expensive if you need 2000+ CPU cores...)

The result is a superior scheduler co-optimized with the CPU, so I'm not surprised that Linux came out ahead.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdXaQuPkZs4

[2] https://youtu.be/5yJFjhqvt8g?feature=shared&t=690

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Linux-perf-schedstat-Tool

Interesting but a surprising lack of detail on why Linux outperforms Windows and even less on why Zen 5 widens the gap. Does anyone know why this is happening? Is Zen5 harder to schedule for and Linux better at scheduling?

I see chips and cheese noted there's an increase in latency between ccxs in zen5, which I guess would tend to exaggerate poor scheduling decisions - could that explain it?

Anandtech mentions in their review [0] that AMD is shipping a scheduling driver for Windows, with a "game mode" that disables one of the CCDs to prevent games from experiencing high latencies due to threads being spread across dies. So, presumably: yeah, scheduling for this chip is hard and Linux is much better at heterogenous scheduling situations (having been used extensively in e.g. big.LITTLE and NUMA systems for many years certainly can't hurt)!

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21524/the-amd-ryzen-9-9950x-a...

It's worth noting that AMD had worked with Microsoft on Zen-specific optimizations in the past, too. Ahead of the Zen 2 launch, they touted improvements of up to 15% from Windows scheduler changes for CPU topology awareness [1]. And with Zen 5 having higher cross-CCD communication latency than the previous generations [2], it probably gets an even harsher penalty from poor scheduling.

While the less-than-stellar reviews for the 9950X are already out, AMD's recent strategy of staggering releases for desktop parts (first the regular, then the X3D SKUs) can improve this generation's perception, assuming there are meaningful performance gains they can reach in software for Zen 5 prior to the X3D release.

[1] https://borncity.com/win/2019/06/30/windows-10-v1903-optimiz...

[2] https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/08/14/amds-ryzen-9950x-zen-5...

>While the less-than-stellar reviews

Isent it as good or better than the top Intel CPU but at like half the power consumption?

In many of the benchmarks linked in the OP and in my comment, particularly gaming benchmarks, the high-end SKUs show results that are significantly worse than would be expected considering the raw performance of the CPU cores and the performance of lower-end or previous-generation chips on the same benchmarks. The problem appears to be due to the Windows 11 scheduler doing an especially poor job of deciding how to schedule threads onto the processor's 2 dies. This generation has particularly high latency between the dies, so if an application does a lot of inter-thread communication and Windows spreads those threads across cores on different dies, application performance suffers significantly.

It's probably something that will be fixed soon with software updates, and Linux fares much better. But the result is that launch-day benchmarks are much worse than they "should" be.

Yes but for gaming wait for X3D CPUs. We already knew this before release?

I love ubuntu/linux for everything. Development, games under proton or classics via lutris, emulators or sourceports. It's just mecca. My "lesser" hardware performs better than Windows 11 and I am more free to customize. This is the greatest time to be a Linux user ever, and it's only getting better.

Windows currently has a bug which reduces Zen 4 and 5 performance, at least for gaming, a future patch will address that.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1INvx9ca9M

Are we sure this isn't just about power saving modes, boost frequencies, compiler flags or sth. simple like this?

All of those are possible factors.

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