The Performance Impact From Different Arch Linux Kernel Flavors

First up were a few gaming tests and ended up being an interesting mix of kernel leaders. With the DDraceNetwork platformer game, the Zen kernel build offered slightly better performance than the default Arch Linux stable kernel or that of the hardened kernel build while the LTS and real-time kernels performed notably worse for this game, which runs with ease on any modern GPU.

With the Tesseract first person shooter game meanwhile there wasn't much change in performance at 1080p besides the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel performing much slower, likely due to new AMDGPU optimizations having been merged since that point for benefiting the Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics being tested in this article.

Interestingly with the Unvanquished shooter game the real-time kernel, currently based on Linux 6.0, offered significantly better performance than the Zen kernel or the standard Arch Linux stable kernel. Again here the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel performed the slowest.

Or when running the Xonotic game, the Zen kernel returned to being the front-runner.

With the YQuake2 game rendered using OpenGL, the real-time kernel was the fastest followed by the Zen kernel and then the stable kernel. For gamers making use of the open-source Radeon (or Intel) graphics, using Linux LTS tends to be the slowest due to the older kernel DRM driver state.