Linux 5.16 Has A Nice Performance Gift For AMD Ryzen Laptops With Radeon Graphics

This improvement with Linux 5.16 was fascinating and came unexpected. Linux 5.16 has many new features including AMDGPU kernel driver improvements, but this Radeon Vega graphics boost came as a surprise as there wasn't any announced optimization and the Vega graphics support at this stage is quite mature. It may also be a combination of CPU-related improvements with Linux 5.16. I've been testing Linux 5.16 Git for many weeks now and haven't seen this on systems with Radeon discrete graphics while over the holidays testing more laptops/desktops to get a better understanding for how widespread this improvement is, so stay tuned. But for now:

I did run some benchmarks on a completely different laptop featuring a Ryzen 5 5500U. That Ryzen laptop too is seeing nice uplift on Linux 5.16 across various graphics tests:

See this OpenBenchmarking.org result file for all the individual data.

Linux 5.16 is expected to be released as stable on 9 January. Stay tuned for more kernel benchmarks.