Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance Is Very Close On The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X

The last area being looked at today is the web browser benchmarks with both Google Chrome and Firefox.

Traditionally Windows has led in delivering the best web browser performance and overall experience with both Firefox and Chrome. With this round of testing, Windows and Ubuntu Linux were showing healthy competition for the browser performance from this high-end AMD Ryzen 9 7950X desktop.

In a number of the browser benchmarks the best Linux performance is shown when using the amd-pstate performance governor and that also allowed it to better align with the out-of-the-box Windows 11 performance.

All of my benchmarks in full from this AMD Ryzen 9 7950X testing on Windows and Linux can be found via this OB result page.

Out of 109 benchmarks carried out across all the operating system configurations, here is where things stand with the geometric mean. Windows 11 Pro 22H2 was effectively tied with the out-of-the-box Ubuntu Linux performance. Moving from Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS to the near-final Ubuntu 22.10 state also hadn't helped the performance in these benchmarks carried out on the Zen 4 desktop. Moving up to the latest Linux 6.0 stable kernel also hadn't yielded any measurable uplift. Where Linux came out ahead was when switching from the amd-pstate schedutil default up to the performance governor where overall boosted the performance of this 16-core processor by about 6%.

As already mentioned, these Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks are much closer than we have seen in past x86_64 processor OS comparisons. We'll see in the weeks/months ahead how things play out if either operating system ends up seeing any significant Zen 4 optimizations that tip the table to one side. But where it stands today is a surprisingly equal showing for both competing operating systems.