Early Ubuntu 21.10 Performance Is Looking Good - Especially For Radeon Graphics

Out of 115 tests carried out on the Ryzen 9 5950X desktop, Ubuntu 21.10 is clearly in better shape than Ubuntu 21.04... In cases where 21.10 was behind 21.04, it was very thin margins.

If taking the geometric mean of all 115 benchmarks, Ubuntu 21.10 in its current daily development form was around 2% faster than the current Ubuntu (non-LTS) stable release. But if looking at the side-by-side results of all the benchmarks with a measurable difference it becomes quite telling:

The most significant improvements on Ubuntu 21.10 were with the graphics tests of OpenGL via RadeonSI and Vulkan with RADV. There are a number of very healthy improvements from Ubuntu 21.04 to 21.10 for the Navi (1x) graphics and other GPUs too, especially Navi 2x as well as recent Intel graphics. It's possible the state will be even better too if Linux 5.14 and Mesa 21.2 make it into this release.

Aside from the open-source graphics driver boosts, Ubuntu 21.10 was also seeing nice gains for Numpy, VP9 video encoding, NCNN deep learning, and other workloads at least a few percent faster than 21.04.

More Ubuntu 21.10 benchmark to come as the Impish Indri release approaches. See all 115 tests from this Ryzen 9 5950X development testing via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.